One of the children had put a bunch of apple blossoms on the table at the head of the bed. They were not appropriate--the soft, rosy flowers beside the hard face there on the pillow; the face with its thatch of gray hair over the narrow, domelike brow, seamed and cut with wrinkles; the anxious, melancholy lips set in such icy and eternal indifference--the face of the religious egotist, stamped with inexorable sincerity, stern and cold and mean. Not a father’s face. But his daughter had put her handful of snowy flowers on the pine table, their little gnarled black stems thrust tightly down into a tumbler of water. And then she went tiptoeing out of the silent room. She heard her mother’s little, light voice downstairs in the parlor, and Elder Barnes’s low, respectful murmur in response. They were “making the arrangements.” Esther’s heart stood still, not with grief, but with misery at the strangeness of it all--her silent, meek, obedient mother saying what should or what should not happen to--father! “And, Mr. Barnes, if it will not be a trouble, will you find out for me how much it would cost to send a telegram to my brother in Mercer?” Esther, leaning over the banisters in the upper hall, opened her lips with astonishment. A telegram! It gave the child a sense of the dreadful importance of this May day as nothing else had done. The thought of the expense of it came next, sobering that curious sense of elation which is part of bereavement. “Mother oughtn’t to do that. It will cost--oh, it will cost at least a dollar!” This fifteen-year old Esther had a certain grim practicality, born of a childhood in a minister’s family on five hundred dollars a year. A dollar! And that uncle in Mercer, whom she had never seen, who had quarreled with her mother because she married her father, and who was so rich and powerful (according to a newspaper paragraph she had once read)--this uncle, who had had no connection with them in all these years--what was the use of wasting a dollar in telegraphing him? She meant to say so; and yet, when she went downstairs, after Elder Barnes had gone, and found her little mother standing at the window, looking blankly out at the garden, there was something in the mild, faded face that kept the girl silent. She came up and put her strong young arm about her, and kissed her softly. “Mother, won’t you lie down?” “No, dear; I am not tired. Mr. Barnes has been very kind in telling me what must be done. I do hope everything will be as--_he_ would wish.” They did not speak for a little while, and then Esther said, in a low voice, “Mother, I don’t want to worry you, and--and perhaps it’s very soon to speak of it, but have you thought at all of what is going to become of us?” Her mother put up her hand with a sort of shiver. “No, no; not yet. We mustn’t talk of that yet. Oh, Esther, he is dead! Poor Silas--poor Silas!” She caught her breath like a child, and looked up at her tall daughter in a frightened way.