Then I saw my father sink slowly back, drawing, as he did so, the sheet up and over his face, as if to shut out the sight, and all the time the convulsive fluttering of my own breath alone stirred the tense silence that reigned about us. I must have remained in this position many minutes, fixed and motionless in a trance of fear, when the stealthy noise below seemed to cease suddenly as it had begun. At that I leaped to my feet with a strangled cry and tore the bedclothes away from the face. The eyes stared up at me as if I were the secret presence; the jaw was dropped; the whole body collapsed and sunk into the sheets. He had died without a sound--there--in a moment; had died of that that was beyond human speech; of something to which no dreadful human cry could give expression. * * * * * Wading near knee deep in the flooded meadows, sense and reason returned to me by slow degrees. Then a wan streak of sunrise gaped like a dead man’s wound on the stormy horizon, and a new day was breaking to wind and deluge that seemed endless. Ah, surely I had been tried beyond mortal endurance. So I thought, not knowing what was yet to come; what tension the soul’s fetters can be put to without breaking. The sodden day broadened and found me still wandering. Once during the morning I crept back to the house of terror, and, standing without its door, summoned the old woman, who had come of herself to attend to dead Peggy’s laying out, and told her of my father’s death and directed her to a second task. Later in the day, I told myself, I would return; by and by when the dead should be decently composed for rest and their expression should have resumed something of its normal cast. Then I hurried forth again and sought forgetfulness in the keen rush of air and wide reality of the open country. Walking, resting on some gate or stile; seeking a wayside tavern for food and drink--always I kept steadily away from me the slightest reflection on any of the last words spoken by my father. I could not bear that my thoughts should so much as approach them. I had greatly suffered, been greatly wronged, yet let my mind dwell insistently on the thought that these evils were of the past, never more to vex me out of reason should I look steadily forward, shutting my ears, like the prince in the fairy tale, to the spectral voices that would fain provoke me to an answer. It was growing near that dusky period of the short day when if one lifts one’s eyes from the ground the sky seems closing in upon the earth! Worn out and footsore, I had rounded toward the city from its eastern side and was traversing the now lonely stretch of by-path that leads from the station, when I saw a woman and little child going on in front of me haltingly. As I came up they drew aside to let me pass, and I cried out, “Zyp!” and stopped in astonishment and a little fear.