"Poor Jack!" thought Page; and the wheels seemed to repeat the words like a refrain. He disliked his own task, but it did not seem strange to him that he had been summoned. Mr. Van Tassel had no near relatives in Chicago. Page had had charge of his legal affairs in Boston. Doubtless his address had been among the dead man's papers, and Mrs. Van Tassel's advisers had suggested that he be sent for.
Page shrank repugnantly from encountering this woman, whom disaster followed so relentlessly. He tried not to think of her. Perhaps it would not be necessary that they should meet at all; yet try as he might, he could not prevent his imagination from picturing the siren, who had succeeded in capturing the honest, cordial, fine-natured man, whose death it was difficult to realize. How would Jack bear it? How would his highly strung affectionate nature stand the strain? This woman who had brazenly told him that she did not love his father had been the one to stand near the latter's deathbed; while the loving heart of the son had been kept at a distance by her machinations.
For Page was now fully convinced that Jack had been deliberately deceived as to his father's condition, and he blamed himself hotly for obeying his sister and refraining from intermeddling.
He said to himself that he ought to have talked with Miss Bryant about the matter at R——. The thought of Mildred gave him no pleasure. She was sister to the woman who had robbed Jack, and broken his heart. He felt a sudden conviction of Mrs. Van Tassel's appearance. She was an Amazon; tall, commanding, bold-faced, loud-voiced, with a coarser repetition of her sister's beauty; and involuntarily he shuddered with anticipatory disgust, and wished the next few days well over.
But this was being extraordinarily imaginative for Page, and he realized it all at once, and opened the paper which he had bought, with the newsboy shuffling along beside him as he hastened through the depot in Boston. But his thoughts would not concentrate upon the printed page; rather they flew to Jack's brilliant face,—the face which always said that life was good,—and saw it suddenly stamped with white despair, alone in a strange land.
The next day, arrived in Chicago, Page left the train at Hyde Park and went to a hotel. Half an hour afterward, he emerged and walked toward the lake. It was a dreary day, such as seldom comes in Chicago's October. The lake was gray from recent rain, and an east wind was whipping dead leaves from the elms, across the green lawn around the Van Tassel house.
Page looked at the drawn curtains, walked up the steps to the crape-hung door, and an unexpected lump rose in his throat, for he thought of Jack. In that moment, there came to him a new loyal satisfaction in the fact that he had come; that some one beside aliens would stand near Uncle Richard. It was with a strange mixture of grief and resentment that he met the servant, and asked for Miss Bryant.
He looked around the well-remembered parlor, where the maid left him, and noted that it was newly and fashionably furnished; but scarcely five minutes had passed before Mildred entered the room, and walked straight up to him with outstretched hand.
He returned the greeting with cold formality, and even in the shaded room he could see that the girl's eyes were swelled from weeping.
"I am so glad you could come," she said tremulously. "Was it very inconvenient? We thought you would probably wish to attend the funeral any way. Mr. Van Tassel had so few"—she could go no further, but broke down and wept into her handkerchief.