What significant looks they cast on each other, and the spinster answered quickly:
“Very well, gran’ther, we will have Mr. Gilmer here directly. Now take your nourishment and go to sleep.”
He shook his head, and would take nothing, waiting wearily with failing strength for the coming of the lawyer they had never summoned.
Toward noon he grew drowsy and delirious again, and the spinster, realizing that his end was too near to be helped or hindered now, sent out for the neighbors.
They came gladly enough, full of pity, but Grandfather Groves was too far gone to be glad of their neighborly company now, much as he had fretted for it when the women selfishly kept them away. They could only offer the last kind ministrations to the dying man, who had sunk into a gentle sleep, with gasping breaths coming slower and slower.
When some one, a woman, wiped the death damp from his brow with her soft handkerchief he stirred slightly and smiled with a broken murmur. Those who heard it plainest said afterward that the murmured word was “Eva.”
With that murmur he died, sinking away gently as a child in its mother’s arms into the calm repose of death.
CHAPTER XIV.
DRIVEN FROM HOME.
Exhausted by her wild outcries and her frenzied efforts to break down the door, as well as by her long fast of twenty-four hours, Eva sank unconscious to the floor, and lay there for a long time ere she revived.