CHAPTER XXI

THE FINAL TRAGEDY

The rectory of Christ Church was a gloomy place that Monday evening. The mistress of the house was ill. She had been failing for weeks—slowly at first, but with terrible rapidity as the days wore on. Now the end was almost in sight. Her interview with Ruth Tracy on the Friday afternoon before had left her at the point of collapse. Then had followed the news of the riot. After that her husband had been brought home, bandaged and bloody, victim of an insensate mob. What wonder that she was overwhelmed, physically and mentally, by crowding calamities? When the doctor came from her room that Friday night he looked grave and doubtful. He had expected the collapse. It had been imminent for weeks, but the severity of it startled him. Not that there was any organic disease, he explained, but these cases of extreme nervous prostration were most difficult to treat. Sedatives had only a temporary effect; medicines of any kind would be of but little avail. Indeed the only real hope lay in extra-professional treatment, particularly along the line of mental suggestion. At best the prognosis of the case had little in it that was encouraging.

Ruth Tracy heard of Mrs. Farrar's serious illness, and sent a trained nurse at once to care for her. She felt that this much, at least, it was her right and her duty to do.

If Sunday had been a sorrowful day in the rector's household, Monday was deadening. The minister himself, owing to certain secondary results of his injury,