flowers. Just as Mr. Harding used to have flowers on his White House desk beside the miniature of his mother, I thought.
The house seemed very quiet. The East Center Street trolley cars rumbled past at regular intervals, the same street cars I suppose that used to pass our house when the "Brittons" lived farther out on the same street. Everything was the same; but everything to me was tragically different.
"That's the way it is all day long, Nan," said Miss Harding, calling my attention to a car which drove slowly by while the occupants were gazing curiously at the house wherein we sat. "Thousands and thousands passed his coffin, and everybody remarked the expression upon his face—he looked so peaceful and happy." God, how awful to listen as she told it! I sobbed with Miss Harding as she went on. "He loved life so, you know, Nan," she said. Oh, how well I knew! I told her about the strange dream I had had in Dijon, and how I afterwards had counted up the difference in time between France and the United States and had found that the hour of my dream had been the hour of Mr. Harding's passing. She thought this startlingly coincidental.
I longed to go over and put my arms around her, to tell her that her brother had known some joy during the last years of his life, and that I would have given my own life to have had him know more of such joy. But I sat still and silent in my chair.
Even the grief I felt could not overshadow a certain strange comfort I experienced in being there, 'mid the old familiar surroundings, where his body had last lain in perfect rest. And the spirit that had always been Warren Harding seemed to linger near us as we talked.
Miss Harding's fiance, Mr. Ralph Lewis, came for her. They were going to dine at an inn in a nearby country town—Waldo, she said. (I knew the very place, for I had dined there with the Mousers and Gorhams not long before—the last visit I made to Marion.) They invited me to go with them; they were driving, of course. But I told them I preferred to remain there at the house and would try to rest a bit while they were gone.
