and warm began to flow out of his mouth and nostrils, he lifted his hands up to his throat, the warm wet blood came pouring out across his fingers; he saw it and felt joy.
For now the child—or someone in the house was speaking, calling to him; he heard great footsteps, soft but thunderous, imminent, yet immensely far, a voice well known, never heard before. He called to it, and then it seemed to answer him; he called to it with faith and joy to give him rescue, strength, and life, and it answered him and told him that all the error, old age, pain and grief of life were nothing but an evil dream; that he who had been lost was found again, that his youth would be restored to him and that he would never die, and that he would find again the path he had not taken long ago in a dark wood.
And the child still smiled at him from the dark door; the great steps, soft and powerful, came ever closer, and as the instant imminent approach of that last meeting came intolerably near, he cried out through the lake of jetting blood, “Here, Father, here!” and heard a strong voice answer him, “My son!”
At that instant he was torn by a rending cough, something was wrenched loose in him, the death-gasp rattled through his blood, and a mass of greenish matter foamed out through his lips. Then the world was blotted out, a blind black fog swam up and closed above his head, someone seized him, he was held, supported in two arms, he heard someone’s voice saying in a low tone of terror and of pity, “Mr. Gant! Mr. Gant! Oh, poor man, poor man! He’s gone!” And his brain faded into night. Even before she lowered him back upon the pillows, she knew that he was dead.
Eliza’s sharp scream brought three of her children—Daisy, Steve, and Luke, and the nurse, Bessie Gant, who was the wife of Gant’s nephew Ollie—running from the kitchen. At the same moment Helen, who had taken an hour’s sleep—her first in two days—in the little hall-bedroom off the porch, was wakened by her mother’s cry, the sound of a screen-door slammed, and the sound of footsteps running past her window on the porch. Then, for several minutes she had no consciousness of what she did, and later she could not remember it. Her actions were those of a person driven by a desperate force, who acts from blind intuition, not from reason. Instantly, the moment that she heard her mother scream, the slam of the screen-door, and the running feet, she knew what had happened,
