"That's enough," interrupted Mr. Chattaway. "Never trouble your head about business that's above you. Anything between me and your father, or your mother either, is no concern of yours; you are not old enough to interfere yet. I should like to see him. Do you think I may go in?"
"We can ask," answered George; some vague and indistinct idea floating to his mind that a death-bed reconciliation might help to smooth future difficulties.
He led the way through the fold-yard. Nora was coming out at the back-door as they advanced.
"Nora, do you think Mr. Chattaway may go in to see my father?" asked George.
"If it will do Mr. Chattaway any good," responded Nora, who ever regarded that gentleman in the light of a common enemy, and could with difficulty bring herself to be commonly civil to him. "It's all over; but Mr. Chattaway can see what's left of him."
"Is he dead?" whispered Mr. Chattaway; whilst George lifted his white and startled face.
"He is dead!" broke forth Nora; "and perhaps there may be some that will wish now they had been less hard with him in life. The doctors and Mrs. Ryle have just come out, and the women have gone in to put him straight and comfortable. Mr. Chattaway can go in also, if he would like it."
Mr. Chattaway, it appeared, did not like it. He turned from the door, drawing George with him.
"George, tell your mother I am grieved at her trouble, and wish that beast of a bull had been stuck before he had done this. Tell her if there's any little thing she could fancy from the Hold, to let Edith know, and she'll gladly send it to her. Good-bye, lad. You and Treve must keep up, you know."
He passed out by the fold-yard gate, as he had entered, and George leaned upon it again, with his aching heart; an orphan now. Treve and Caroline had their mother left, but he had no one. It is true he had never known a mother, and Mrs. Ryle, his father's second wife, had supplied the place of one. She had done her duty by him; but it had not been in love; nor very much in gentleness. Of her own children she was inordinately fond; she had not been so of George—which perhaps was in accordance with human nature. It had never troubled George much; but the fact now struck upon him with a sense of intense loneliness. His father had loved him deeply and sincerely: but—he was gone.