Nothing had escaped him here. One moment the wise, kindly little monkey-like countenance was a sentient thing, and the next moment it was a death-mask; one instant it asked questions and made wishes, and in another instant--were its questions answered and its wishes granted? Although he had never seen death, he had looked many times into the bright face of danger in his happy and heedless wanderings. Danger added a fillip; death, he felt, had a gallant bearing, a clean and shining face. This was death with a difference, mean and sordid, sly and cheating; what old Norsemen called “a straw death.” This child had found death before ever she had found life; it was unfair. It made him uncomfortable, indignant, furious. After the frantic quarter of an hour of alarums and excursions, of telephoning and talking, the quiet which ensued was horrible to him. Miss Ada was waiting below to break the news to Glen, and he kept vigil beside Gloriana-Virginia in the prim little guest chamber upstairs, and there rose up in him a hot young rage of grief. He had liked the quaint, ugly, little thing ... he had planned such jolly plans for her! He turned back the sheet and looked at her. The wise little simian face was as tired and as kind as ever, no more so, and no less. Here was no bidding for tears; to the unlovely pathos of her life had been added the unlovely pathos of her death, that was all. But to Mr. Peter Parker of Pasadena, sitting there in the deepest discomfort of his cheerful young life, things his mother had told him, articles she had read aloud to him by main force, paragraphs here and there, obtruded themselves into his consciousness. He wanted intensely to go away, but Miss Ada had taken it gravely for granted that he would remain until the child’s aunt arrived. He dropped the sheet over her again, but it seemed as if he could see through it, as clearly as through a window pane, and the small yellow face and the ugly, misshaped claws and the wizened body became the piercing mouthpiece of her kind--the rest of them in the mill--his mill--and other mills, and cotton fields, and beet fields, and factories and prune orchards, and oyster sheds.