So another summer came round again, with its promise of a renewal of all the old delights, and Comethup was eight years old. Not a great age, certainly, save to the mind of a little child; but Comethup was older than his years, and looked on life, perhaps, with graver eyes than most. Nothing seemed to have changed in his small world; the captain looked exactly the same as of old, and carried himself as stiffly erect as ever. 'Linda had grown, but not to an extent to be marked by one who saw her almost daily. Then suddenly into Comethup's quiet life came a great and terrible change.
One summer Sunday morning he was waiting as usual for the captain at the door of his father's cottage. The bells above him were ringing for church, and he was expecting every moment that his father would pass him, as usual, with his books under his arm, and a kindly word for the child on his lips, on his way into the church. But this morning, although he could see at the far end of the sunlit street the figure of the captain marching toward him, he had seen nothing of his father; and the bell above him had started that slow, dull tolling which gave warning that it would stop in a few moments. Fearing that something might have delayed his father, or that he might--although that seemed impossible--have forgotten the time, he turned, and ran up the stairs to his father's room. It was a small room near his own; the big best bedroom in which he had been born and in which his mother had died, was never used, and was always kept scrupulously clean and neat behind its closed door.
But David Willis was not in his room, and Comethup, a little vaguely frightened, was coming down again, when he saw that the door of the unused room stood slightly open. He paused, and then drew near and peeped in. In the semi-darkness--for the blinds were always drawn there--he saw his father kneeling beside the great bed, with his arms stretched out upon it, and his head buried between them; he seemed to be praying. Ashamed even at the thought of prying at such a moment, Comethup stole gently down the stairs, turned at the foot of them, and called loudly to his father, for the bell had stopped ringing now, and the captain was standing, watch in hand, in the cottage doorway.