He had counted on triumphing through the streets where he had shuffled. He had spent magnificently the money he was going to get. They hurried him home in a closed carriage, but he could not endure the calls of old friends and enemies who came to express their sympathy. He collapsed like the tall chimney the lightning had struck at Tuliptree. It was Patty of all people who begged RoBards to take him and her and her mother to the farm. Even she longed for obscurity, for she also had squandered royally that money that never arrived. They left the children at home with Teen, and set out as on a long funeral ride, with their dreams in the hearse. The journey by train was too public and the railroad was a new-fangled, nerve-wrecking toy. It was dangerous, too—almost as dangerous as the steamboats that were blowing up, burning up, and sinking on all the seas and rivers, dragging their passengers to triple deaths. People were forgetting how many people had been killed by horses. They seemed to think that death itself was a modern invention. Old Jessamine had to endure a hired carriage with a shabby driver who talked and spat incessantly. When they reached at last the farm, the senile wretch was racked of body and soul and they put him to bed, a white-haired, whimpering infant. The rest were so wearied of the effort to console him that they grew disgusted with grief. Patty had just so much sympathy in her heart. When that was used up, you came to the bitter lees of it. She began to scold her father and at length produced a bottle of laudanum that she kept to quiet the children with when they cried too long. She threatened her father with it now: “You big baby! If you don’t stop that noise and go to sleep this very instant, I’ll give you enough of these sleeping drops to quiet you for a week.” She remembered afterward the strange look he cast upon the phial and how his eyes followed it when she put it back in the cupboard’s little forest of drugs and lotions that had accumulated there for years. Her father wept no more. He lay so quiet that she put her mother to bed alongside him. As she bent to kiss him good night, he put up his ancient arms and drew her head down and whispered, like a repentant child: “I’m sorry, my sweet, to be so great a pest to everybody. Forgive me, honey! I wanted to cover you with jewels and satins and everything your pretty heart could wish, but—but—I’ve lived too long.” “Now! now!” said Patty, kissing him again as she turned away to quell the sobs that sprang to her throat. Her mother was already fast asleep in her nightcap and her well-earned wrinkles; her teeth on the bureau and her mouth cruelly ancient. Her father stared at Patty with the somber old eyes of a beaten hound. Life had whipped him. Doleful enough, Patty lay down at the side of her husband, who was even more forlorn than usual. She groaned: “Oh, dear, such an unhappy world as this is!”