The Prodigals and Their Inheritance

EDWARD came out to meet her, and took her hand and drew it through his arm. He led her in tenderly, holding that hand in his, without a vestige of the reserve and restraint in which they had been living of late. Winifred was greatly surprised. She drew away her hand, half-angry, half-astonished. "Why is this?" she said. "Is it because it is so early that you forget"- "It is because there is no longer any need of precaution," he said very gravely, pressing her arm close to his side. She gazed at him with an incapacity to understand, which would have been incredible did it not happen so often at the great crises of life. "I don't know what you mean; nothing is changed," she said. "But you have not come to talk of you and me. Edward, how is my father?" She asked the question with scarcely a fear. Then suddenly looked in his face, flung his support from her, and flew upstairs without a word. The door of her father's room was closed; she rushed at it breathless. It was half-opened after a little interval by old Hopkins, who barred the entrance. "You can't come in yet, Miss Winifred, not yet," he said, shaking his head. Hopkins was full of the solemn importance and excitement of one who has suddenly become an actor in a great event. He closed the door upon her as he spoke, and there she stood, gazing at it blankly, her brain swim ming, her heart beating. That door had closed not only upon her father dead, but upon a completed chapter of her own life. Edward had hurried upstairs after her, and was now close by to console her. But she would not give him her hand, which he sought. She walked before him to the door of her own sitting-room, which stood wide open, with an early glow of the newly-risen sun showing from the open windows. Then she sat down and motioned him to a chair, but not beside her. A more woeful countenance never lamented the most beloved of fathers. Her dark outer garment was wet with dew, and clung closely about her; her hair had a few drops of the same dew glimmering upon it; her face was entirely destitute of colour. "Tell me how it was," she said. "It was as I told you it would be. We must be thankful that no act of ours, no con tention of ours, quickened the catastrophe. He was in perfectly good spirits last night, I hear. By the time I arrived, all was over. Winifred"- "Oh, do not touch me!" she said. "We deceived him, we lied to him! if not in words, yet in deeds. And now you are glad that he is dead." "Not glad," said the young man.