"All is over, my dear friends. His passage has been quite painless. I never saw an easier death."
And he drew up the sheet over the face of the dead.
Although all day they had hourly expected this end, yet now they could not quite believe that it had indeed come.
The huge, strong man, the rugged Iron King—dead? He who, if not as indestructible as he seemed, was at least constituted of that stern stuff of which centenarians are made, and whom all expected should live far up into the eighties or nineties—dead? The father who had lived over them like some mighty governing and protecting power all their lives, necessary, inevitable, inseparable from their lives—dead?
"Come, my dear," said Mr. Clarence, gently raising Corona and leading her away. "You have this to console you: he died reconciled to you, holding your hand in his to the last."
"Ah, dear Uncle Clarence, you have much more to console you, for you never failed even once in your duty to him, and never gave him one moment of uneasiness in all your life," replied Corona, as she left him in front of her old room.
She entered and shut the door and gave way to the natural grief that overwhelmed her for a time.
When she was sufficiently composed she sat down and wrote to her brother, informing him of what had occurred, and telling him that she still held her purpose of going out to him with the Nevilles.