Jane had passed her thirty-fifth birthday, when she became palpitatingly
aware of a pair of blue-gray eyes, and a determined, smooth-shaven chin
belonging to the recently arrived principal of the village school. In
spite of her stern admonition to herself to remember her years and not
quite lose her head, she was fast drifting into a rosy dream of romance
that was all the more enthralling because so belated, when the summons
of a small boy brought her sharply back to the realities.

"It's yer father, miss. They want ye ter come," he panted. "Somethin'
has took him. He's in Mackey's drug store, talkin' awful queer. He ain't
his self, ye know. They thought maybe you could--do somethin'."

Jane went at once--but she could do nothing except to lead gently home
the chattering, shifting-eyed thing that had once been her father. One
after another the village physicians shook their heads--they could do
nothing. Skilled alienists from the city--they, too, could do nothing.
There was nothing that could be done, they said, except to care for him
as one would for a child. He would live years, probably. His
constitution was wonderfully good. He would not be violent--just foolish
and childish, with perhaps a growing irritability as the years passed
and his physical strength failed.

Mary and Edgar had come home at once. Mary had stayed two days and Edgar
five hours. They were shocked and dismayed at their father's condition.
So overwhelmed with grief were they, indeed, that they fled from the
room almost immediately upon seeing him, and Edgar took the first train
out of town.

Mary, shiveringly, crept from room to room, trying to find a place where
the cackling laugh and the fretful voice would not reach her. But the