In dumb confusion, David stood by the great bed. More vaguely, the squire's puzzle was his also. His mother had had an empty life—it should not have been empty. He could not understand her, he could not understand his father. They had put him away from them. The old resentful, heart-breaking misery came back; he had no people, he had no one who loved him. Then resentment faded and grief filled him. Like a lover, refused, rejected, he knelt down beside the great bed.
"Oh, mother!" cried David, again and again. "Oh, mother, mother!" Then the old, unanswered, unanswerable cry, "Speak to me!"
From the great bed came no sign. David rose presently and laid back the cover over the smiling lips and turned the light low and went down to join the squire. Composedly he made plans with him for the funeral. The squire announced that he and Bevy had come to take up their abode unless David wished to be alone. The squire looked at David, startled. In the last year David had grown more than ever like his parents; he had his mother's features and his father's deep gray eyes and thickly curling hair.
"When you are through your school, you must settle down in Millerstown," said the squire. "There ought to be little folks here in this house."
David's heart leaped, then sank back to its place. He had cured himself of Katy Gaumer; such flashes were only meaningless recollections of past habit.
"I am thinking of studying law," he told the squire. "That will keep me in school three years more. And then I couldn't practice law in Millerstown."
"The Hartmans are not lawyers," said the squire. "The Hartmans are farmers. You would have plenty to keep you busy, David."
If old habit caused David to look for Katy Gaumer, David's eyes were not gratified by what they sought. Neither before his mother's funeral nor afterward did she appear. Bevy had removed her few belongings from David's room before he returned; there remained in the Hartman house no evidence of her presence. Bevy said that Katy was tired, that she lay all day on the settle in her uncle's kitchen. Bevy longed to pour out to David an account of Katy's treatment at the hands of Alvin Koehler, prospective church member though he was. But she had been forbidden by the squire to open her lips on the subject; and, besides, David Hartman, the heir to all this magnificence, could hardly be expected to take an interest in one who had demeaned herself to become his mother's servant. Nevertheless, a wild scheme formed itself in Bevy's mind.
"Sometimes Katy cries," reported Bevy sentimentally to David. "It seems as though this brought back everything about her gran'mom and everything. Yesterday she was real sick, but to-day she complains better again. Katy has had a good deal of trouble in this world."
David frowned. He was going back to college in the morning; his bag was already packed. Katy had been in the house until the time of his mother's death; she should have asked him to come to see her. Old habit tempted him to play once more with fire.