"And will you hurry back to us, daddy?" Helen called to him.
"Yes, child; I'll hurry back," he answered,—as he hurried away.
His secretary handed him a telegram. He took the yellow envelope and, without so much as glancing at it, went into the library and shut the door.
* * * * *
Very late in the afternoon the library door was opened, without invitation from within. Mr. Phillips was sitting in a chair with his arms upon his desk and his face upon his arm—dead.
"HIS ARMS UPON HIS DESK AND HIS FACE UPON HIS ARM—DEAD."
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Again, and of necessity, is the reader cited to the newspapers of the time.
It is not meet that the passing of a chief magistrate of this nation should be passed over quickly or lightly in any history. The people stopped to mourn, to cast up his life in total, and pay respect to its multiplied excellences, to study his virtues as if in hope to reincarnate them, and to glory in his life as a common possession of his country. And yet this narrative may not pause to pay befitting tribute to him, nor to detail the tides of grief that swept the hearts of his countrymen with his outgoing, or the stateliness and grandeur of the ceremonies with which they committed his body to the ground. We may not here give the comprehensive view, for our canvas is not broad enough. Let it be said only that he died as he had lived: a gentleman brave and tender,—honest to his undoing, but dead without having known defeat,—faithful to his love for Helen even to the death, yet making no plaint against love.