Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 04.djvu/109

Rh between his teeth. If he had an ounce of pep about him, he'd get out and work the flowers. Sleeps too much anyway. Not good for him."

She stamped out of the room and down the hall, and Letty heard her open the door of the study and scream at her husband.

"Hector DeBrugh! Wake up!"

There was a silence, during which Letty wondered what was going on. Then she heard the noisy clop-clop of Mrs. DeBrugh's slippers on the hardwood floor of the study, and she knew the woman was going to shake the daylights out of Mr. DeBrugh and frighten him into wakefulness. She could even imagine she heard Mrs. DeBrugh grasp the lapels of her husband's coat and shake him back and forth against the chair.

Then she heard the scream. It came quite abruptly from Mrs. DeBrugh in the study, and it frightened Letty out of her wits momentarily. After that there was the thud of a falling body and the clatter of an upset piece of furniture.

Letty hurried out of the room into the hall and through the open door of the study. She saw Mrs. DeBrugh slumped on the floor in a faint, and beside her an upset ash-tray. But her eyes did not linger on the woman, nor the tray. Instead, they focussed on the still form of Mr. DeBrugh in the sofa.

He was slumped down, his head twisted to one side and his mouth hanging open from the shaking Mrs. DeBrugh had given him. The meerschaum had slipped from between his teeth, and the cold ashes were scattered on his trousers.

Even then, before the sea of tears began to flow from her eyes, Letty knew the old man was dead. She knew what he had meant by the speech he had said to her only a few minutes before.

heart," was the comment of the doctor who arrived a short time later and pronounced the old man dead. "He had to go. Today, tomorrow. Soon."

After that, he put Mrs. DeBrugh to bed and turned to Letty.

"Mrs. DeBrugh is merely suffering from a slight shock. There is nothing more that I can do. When she awakens, see that she stays in bed. For the rest of the day."

He left then, and Letty felt a strange coldness about the place, something that had not been there while Mr. DeBrugh was alive.

She went downstairs and made several telephone calls which she knew would be necessary. Later, when Mrs. DeBrugh was feeling better, other arrangements could be made.

She straightened the furniture in the study, pushing the familiar sofa back in place, from where Mr. DeBrugh invariably moved it. Then she knocked the ashes from the meerschaum, wiped it off, and placed it carefully in the little glass cabinet on the wall where he always kept it.

Times would be different now, she knew. She remembered what he had said. "You will be well taken care of." But there had been something else. "After Mrs. DeBrugh and I are gone."

Letty could no longer hold back the tears. She fell into a chair and they poured forth.

But time always passes, and with it goes a healing balm for most all sorrows. First there was the funeral. Then came other arrangements. And there was the will, which Mrs. DeBrugh never mentioned.

His things would have fallen into decay but for the hands of Letty. Always her dust-cloth made his study immaculate. Always the sofa was in place and