His wife, divining for the first time the actual state of affairs, flung herself forward on her knees beside the silent figure, her sobs scaling to a crescendo cry of terror.
Slowly Caleb Conover opened his eyes. Reluctantly, as though drawn back by sheer force from the very threshold of the wide portals of Rest, his spirit paused for an instant longer in its earthly abode—paused and flared up, as a dying spark, in the Railroader’s stiffening face.
For a moment his eyes—already wide with the awful mystery of the Beyond—strayed over his kneeling wife; over the sparse locks bunched up in that halo of kid curlers; over the pudgy shape so mercilessly outlined by the sheer nightgown; over the tear-swollen red eyes, the blotched cheeks, the quivering, pursed-up mouth.
“Letty,” he panted, in tired disgust, “you look—more like a measly rabbit—every day!”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- P. [262], changed “its waist, it a blamed” to “its waist, is a blamed”.
- Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.
- Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.