The cloud passed on, and the last soft rays of that setting October sun flashed upon his pallid face.
Mrs. Poythress sprang to her feet. Bending over him with clasped hands, she poured upon him one long look of passionate interrogation.
He tried to speak. His eyes glanced from face to face, as though beseeching help. Mrs. Poythress turned to Charley. He stood with his eyes fixed upon the floor. She sprang in front of him, and placing a hand upon either shoulder, and drawing him close to her, with wide-staring, eager eyes, that would wring an answer from him, looked into his:
“Charley?”
“Yes,” said he.
She turned to the bed.
He had heard; and an ineffable tenderness had come into his face, softening, sweeping away, with the rush of unspeakable love, the hard lines that years of suffering had wrought. ’Twas a boy’s face once more—’twas Edmund’s—’twas—?
She stood before him with outstretched arms, eager with certainty,—held motionless by a slender thread of doubt.
He tried to speak. And again—
At last, with one supreme effort, and borne upon his last breath, a murmured word broke the stillness of the room. One little word,—but that the sweetest, tenderest, that tongue of man can utter,—