"What is it, father?" said Ellen.

"Yes—yes—yes," burst from him in thick, straining utterances.
"Yes—yes—yes."

Mrs. Ranger wiped her eyes. "He is silent for hours," she said; "then he seems to want to say something. But when he speaks, it's only as just now. He says 'Yes—yes—yes' over and over again until his strength gives out."

The bursting of the blood vessels in his brain had torn out the nerve connection between the seat of power of speech and the vocal organs. He could think clearly, could put his thoughts into the necessary words; but when his will sent what he wished to say along his nerves toward the vocal organs, it encountered that gap, and could not cross it.

What did he wish to say? What was the message that could not get through, though he was putting his whole soul into it? At first he would begin again the struggle to speak, as soon as he had recovered from the last effort and failure; then the idea came to him that if he would hoard strength, he might gather enough to force a passage for the words—for he did not realize that the connection was broken, and broken forever. So, he would wait, at first for several hours, later for several days; and, when he thought himself strong enough or could no longer refrain, he would try to burst the bonds which seemed to be holding him. With his children, or his wife and children, watching him with agonized faces, he would make a struggle so violent, so resolute, that even that dead body was galvanized into a ghastly distortion of tortured life. Always in vain; always the same collapse of despair and exhaustion; the chasm between thought and speech could not be bridged. They brought everything they could think of his possibly wanting; they brought to his room everyone with whom he had ever had any sort of more than casual relations—Torrey, among scores of others. But he viewed each object and each person with the same awful despairing look, his immobile lips giving muffled passage to that eternal "Yes! Yes! Yes!" And at last they decided they were mistaken, that it was no particular thing he wanted, but only the natural fierce desire to break through those prison walls, invisible, translucent, intangible, worse than death.

* * * * *

Sorrow and anxiety and care pressed so heavily and so unceasingly upon that household for several weeks that there was no time for, no thought of, anything but Hiram. Finally, however, the law of routine mercifully reasserted itself; their lives, in habit and in thought, readjusted, conformed to the new conditions, as human lives will, however chaotic has been the havoc that demolished the old routine. Then Adelaide took from her writing desk Ross's letters, which she had glanced at rather than read as they came; when she finished the rereading, or reading, she was not only as unsatisfied as when she began, but puzzled, to boot—and puzzled that she was puzzled. She read them again—it did not take long, for they were brief; even the first letter after he heard of her father's illness filled only the four sides of one sheet, and was written large and loose. "He has sent short letters," said she, "because he did not want to trouble me with long ones at this time." But, though this excuse was as plausible as most of those we invent to assist us to believe what we want to believe, it did not quite banish a certain hollow, hungry feeling, a sense of distaste for such food as the letters did provide. She was not experienced enough to know that the expression of the countenance of a letter is telltale beyond the expression of the countenance of its writer; that the face may be controlled to lie, but never yet were satisfying and fully deceptive lies told upon paper. Without being conscious of the action of the sly, subconscious instinct which prompted it, she began to revolve her friend, Theresa Howland, whose house party Ross was honoring with such an extraordinarily long lingering. "I hope Theresa is seeing that he has a good time," she said. "I suppose he thinks as he says—that he'd only be in the way here. That's a man's view! It's selfish, but who isn't selfish?"

Thus, without her being in the least aware of the process, her mind was preparing her for what was about to happen. It is a poor mind, or poorly served by its subconscious half, that is taken wholly by surprise by any blow. There are always forewarnings; and while the surface mind habitually refuses to note them, though they be clear as sunset silhouettes, the subconscious mind is not so stupid—so blind under the sweet spells of that arch-enchanter, vanity.

At last Ross came, but without sending Adelaide word. His telegram to his mother gave just time for a trap to meet him at the station. As he was ascending the broad, stone approaches of the main entrance to the house at Point Helen, she appeared in the doorway, her face really beautiful with mother-pride. For Janet she cared as it is the duty of parent to care for child; Ross she loved. It was not mere maternal imagination that made her so proud of him; he was a distinguished and attractive figure of the kind that dominates the crowds at football games, polo and tennis matches, summer resort dances, and all those events which gather together the youth of our prosperous classes. Of the medium height, with a strong look about the shoulders, with sufficiently, though not aggressively, positive features and a clear skin, with gray-green eyes, good teeth, and a pleasing expression, he had an excellent natural basis on which to build himself into a particularly engaging and plausible type of fashionable gentleman. He was in traveling tweeds of pronounced plaid which, however, he carried off without vulgarity. His trousers were rolled high, after the fashion of the day, to show dark red socks of the same color as his tie and of a shade harmonious to the stripe in the pattern of shirt and suit and to the stones in his cuff links. He looked clean, with the cleanness of a tree after the measureless drenching of a storm; he had a careless, easy air, which completely concealed his assiduous and self-complacent self-consciousness. He embraced his mother with enthusiasm.

"How well you look!" he exclaimed; then, with a glance round, "How well everything looks!"