But even as he framed the wish the door opened noiselessly, and Mr. Huntingdon raised his eyes. A tall woman with gray hair like his, and a pale, beautiful face with an expression on it that almost froze his blood, looked at him for a moment, then silently passed up the room, and with her dress brushing him as he sat there motionless, paused beside the couch. And it was thus that Nea and her father met again. But she did not notice him; there was only one object for her eyes—the still, mute figure of her boy. Silently, and still with that awful look of woe on her face, she drew the dark head into her arms, and laid the dead cheek against her breast; and as she felt the irresponsive weight, the chilled touch, her dried-up misery gave way, and the tears streamed from her eyes.
She was calling him her darling—her only boy.
She had forgotten his cowardly desertion of her; the faults and follies of his youth. Living, he had been little to her, but she claimed the dead as her own. She had forgotten all; she was the young mother again, as she smoothed the dark hair with her thin fingers and pressed the cold face closer to her bosom, as though she could warm the deadly chill of death.
“Nea,” exclaimed a feeble voice in her ear. “Nea, he was my boy too.” And looking up, she saw the tall bowed figure of her father, and two wrinkled hands stretched out to her. Ah, she was back in the present again. She laid her boy down on the pillow, and drew the quilt tenderly over him; but all the beauty and softness seemed to die out of her face, as she turned to her father.
“My boy,” she answered, “not yours; for you never loved him as I did. You tempted him from me, and made him despise his mother; but he is mine now; God took him from you who were ruining him soul and body, to give him back to me.”
“Nea,” returned the old man with a groan, “I have sinned—I know it now. I have blighted your life; I have been a hard cruel father; but in the presence of the dead there should be peace.”
“My life,” she moaned; “my life. Ah, if that were all I could have forgiven it long ago; but it was Maurice—Maurice whom you left to die of a broken heart, though I prayed you to come with me. It was my husband whom you killed; and now, but for you my boy would be living.”
“Nea, Nea,” he wailed again; “my only child, Nea;” but as she turned, moved by the concentrated agony of his voice, he fell with his face downward on the couch, across the feet of his dead grandson.
* * * * * *
The doctors who were summoned said that a paralytic seizure had long been impending; he might linger for a few weeks, but it was impossible to say whether he would ever recover full consciousness again.