“There’s Dad!” he cried. “Are you going away, too, with mamma and me? She’s going to take me far out into the river, away and away, and we are never coming back any more, never going to play any more up there on the lawn!” His voice rose in the childish treble of wonder, and he added, after a moment: [Illustration: “HIS WIFE WAS ... HURRIEDLY UNDRESSING THE CHILD.”] “Now you come, too, Dad.” “Evelyn! What does this mean?” She had risen hastily when little Oscar called out to his father. Her eyes were red with tears, and her hands shook with nervousness. “I thought it would be all done, all over, before you came,” she murmured. “But he would not come with me unless I took off his clothes. I tried to take him in my arms, but he broke away.” The man shuddered as he gradually comprehended what it meant. Little Oscar ran back to his mother and put his face close to hers. “Mamma is sick,” he said gently. “You must take her home and put her to bed and have Dora sing to her.” His lithe little body danced up and down. The hot wind waved his black curls around his neck. His mother pushed him away. “Take him,” she groaned. “It kills me to look at him.” Simmons gathered up the child’s clothes and began to put them on the dancing figure. “What has crazed you?” he demanded roughly of his wife. “I will tell you--when he is gone,” she answered wearily, leaning her head against the shingled wall of the boat-house. Little Oscar ran to and fro in his drawers, wet the tips of his feet, and threw sand into the water, while his father was trying to dress him. Finally the mother took the child, put on his shirt, and told him to run home. He dashed into the thicket of alders beside the river with a shout. Soon they heard his voice in the meadow, ringing with the joy of living, the animal utterance of life. “It was this afternoon,” the mother explained. “The Porters’ children and the Boyces’ boy were playing on the terrace. Dora was away. I was reading in my bedroom--I had told Dora I would look after the children. I must have dropped asleep with the heat--perhaps a minute, perhaps longer. Suddenly, I _felt_ something fearful. I seemed to hear a choking, a gurgling. When I jumped up, awake, everything was still, quiet,--too quiet, I thought; and I ran to the window over the terrace.” She covered her face with her hands to shut out the sight of it, and the rest came brokenly through her smothered lips: “Oscar was there--he and little Ned Boyce. Ned was lying--down on the brick floor--and Oscar had his hands about his throat choking him. I must have screamed. Oscar jumped up, and looked around. He said--he said just like himself,--‘What is it, mamma?’” She stopped again and swallowed her tears. “When I got down there, Ned was white and still. I thought he was dead. It was a long, long time before he got his breath, before he was himself. If, if I hadn’t wakened just then--”