Blair nodded. "Of course," he said. At which Nannie, who had been crying softly to herself, suddenly looked up. "I would rather be by myself. I don't want any one here. Please go home with Elizabeth, Blair. Please!" "But Nannie dear, I want to stay," Blair began, gently; she interrupted him, almost hysterically: "No! _Please!_ It troubles me. I would rather you didn't. I--I want to be alone." "Well," Blair said, vaguely; he was too dazed to protest. Robert Ferguson yielded too, though with a little surprise at her vehemence. Then he turned to Blair; "I'll give you some telegrams that must be sent," he said, in the old friendly voice. It was only when he wrote a despatch to David's mother that the world was suddenly adjusted to its old levels of anger and contempt. "I'll send this myself," he said, coldly. Blair, with instant intuition, replied as coldly, "Oh, very well." He and Elizabeth went back to the hotel in silence, each deeply shaken by the mere physical fact of death. When they reached the gloomy granite columns of the old River House, Blair left his wife, saying briefly something about "walking for a while." He wanted to be alone. This was not because he felt any lack of sympathy in Elizabeth; on the contrary, he was nearer to her than at any time since their marriage; but it was a moment that demanded solitude. So he wandered about Mercer's streets by himself until after midnight--down to the old covered bridge, past Mrs. Todd's ice-cream saloon, out into the country, where the wind was rising, and the tree-tops had begun to sway against the sky. There is a bond, it appears, between mother and child which endures as long as they do. It is independent of love; reason cannot weaken it; hate cannot destroy it. When a man's mother dies, something in the man dies, too. Blair Maitland, walking aimlessly about in the windy May midnight, standing on the bridge watching the slipping twinkle of a star in the inky ripples below him, was vaguely conscious of this. He thought, with a reluctance that was almost repulsion, of her will. He did not want to think of it, it was not fitting! Yet he knew, back in his mind, that within a few days, as soon as decency permitted, he would take the necessary steps to contest it. Nor did he think definitely of her; certainly not of all the unbeautiful things about her, those acute, incessant trivialities of ugliness which had been a veil between them all his life. Now, the veil was rent, and behind it was a holy of holies,--the inviolable relation of the child and the mother. It was of this that he thought, inarticulately, as he stood on the bridge, listening to the rush of the wind; this, and the bare and unbelievable fact that she "was not." As he struggled to realize her death, he was aware of a curious uneasiness that was almost fright. When he came to Nannie the next morning, he was still deeply absorbed; and when she put something into his hands and said it was from his mother, he suddenly wept.