went into the kitchen as if to perform her usual tasks. Not long afterward she returned carrying a little tray with a cup of hot coffee upon it.
"Will you drink this for me?" she said to him.
He opened his eyes a little impatiently, but he sat up and drank it.
"It's very good," he said, as he fell back again into his old position, "but you mustn't put yourself to trouble for me."
Afterward the coffee was always ready for him when he came in, and he got into the habit of drinking it mechanically.
The books he had been accustomed to pore over at every leisure moment lay unopened. He neither touched nor looked at them.
The two women tried to live their lives as if nothing were happening. They studiously avoided questioning or appearing to observe him.
"We must not let him think that we talk of him," Christian said.
She showed a wonderful gentleness and tact. Until long afterward, Mrs. Murdoch scarcely knew what support and comfort she had in her. Her past life had planted in her a readiness to despair.
"He is like his father," she said once. "He was like him as a child. He is very trusting and faithful, but when his belief is gone it is all over. He has given up as his father did before he died. He will not try to live."
He did not try to live, but he did not think of death. He was too full of other morbid thoughts. He could not follow any idea far. A thousand of them came and went, and in the end were as nothing.
"Why," he kept saying to himself weakly and wearily,
