In an agony of remorse Tom kissed the face where the moisture of death was gathering fast. Then he left her, and when he saw her again she was like a beautiful piece of marble, with a smile on her lips which told of perfect peace. Mark and Fanny watched by her until the great change came, and the hand which had beaten the air constantly was stilled forever, its last stroke falling on the head of her father who knelt beside her. In his heart was anguish such as few men have ever known. Not once had she reproached him. If she had he could have borne better than he could the look in her eyes and the way she shrank from him at times. Once when Fanny was absent from the room for a moment she said to him, “Poor father, I know you are sorry, and I have loved you through it all, but I can’t bear it. I must die. It is better so, for things could never be again as they have been. I couldn’t be happy here, nor anywhere. I want to go to mother and to God. Stay with Tom; he will be kind to you. Don’t go with Fanny, if she urges it,—with her and Roy, I mean. You could not go to her mother.” She had done what she could for all of them, and felt that her work was finished. For an hour or more she lay with her eyes closed and with no perceptible motion in her body except the slow beating of her fingers, and when they stopped she was dead. When sure she was gone Mark broke down entirely, while Fanny and Tom tried in vain to quiet him. “Let me alone,” he said. “I must have it out by myself. Nothing can help me but time.” Leaving the house he spent hours among the hills, walking up and down while the rain, which had begun to fall, beat upon him unnoticed. He did not think of the storm, or the darkness, and stumbled over rocks and bushes until benumbed with cold and wet with the rain he returned to the house, an old man, so broken that he would never be himself again. He let Tom and Roy and Fanny make the arrangements for the funeral, while he sat in the room with Inez, sometimes talking to her, sometimes to himself, and sometimes to Anita, by whom Inez was buried on one of the loveliest mornings of the late summer. There were few visitors in the valley, but all the people in the sparsely settled neighborhood turned out to the funeral, as they had done to her mother’s. The house was filled with the flowers they brought, some from the woods and some from the gardens which were stripped to honor the dead. Early in the morning on the day of the funeral there came from Stockton a box of exquisite roses and a pillow of flowers, with Inez’s name in the centre. The moment she heard of Inez’s death Mrs. Prescott had telegraphed for the flowers, urging haste and fearing lest her gift should not be in time. As the funeral did not take place until the third day after Inez’s death, they were in time, and neither Fanny nor Mark would have had any doubt as to the sender, if her card, “Mrs. Helen Tracy Prescott,” had not accompanied them.