e
feeble cries of the weary infant upon her breast. With the dawn, she
muffled herself and child in a shawl, and went forth to seek him. Half
way from her wretched home to the palatial mansion of Mr. Trevlyn she
found her husband, stone dead, and shrouded in the snow--the tender,
pitiful snow, that covered him and his wretchedness from sight.

After that, people who knew Mr. Trevlyn said that he grew more fretful
and disagreeable. His hair was bleached white as the snow, his hands
shook, and his erect frame was bowed and bent like that of a very aged
man. His wife, Hubert's mother, pined away to a mere shadow, and before
the lapse of a year she was a hopeless idiot.

Helen Trevlyn took up the burden of her life, refusing to despair because
of her child. It was a hard struggle for her, and she lived on, until, as
we have seen, when Archer was nine years of age, she died.

When all this was known to Archer Trevlyn he was almost beside himself
with passion. If he had possessed the power, he would have wiped the
whole Trevlyn race out of existence. He shut himself up in his desolate
garret with the tell-tale letters and papers which had belonged to his
mother, and there, all alone, he took a fearful oath of vengeance. The
wrongs of his parents should yet be visited on the head of the man who
had been so cruelly unpitying. He did not know what form his revenge
might take, but, so sure as he lived, it should fall some time!

* * * * *

Five years passed. Archer was fourteen years of age. He had left the
street-sweeping business some time before, at the command of Grandma
Rugg, and entered a third-class restaurant as an under-waiter. It was not
the best school in the world for good morals. The people who frequented
the Garden Rooms, as they were called, were mostly of a low class, and
all the interests and associations surrounding Arch were bad. But perhaps
he was not one to be influenced very largely by his surroundings. So the
Garden Rooms, if they did not make him better, did not make him worse.

In all these years he had kept the memory of Margie Harrison fresh and
green, though he had not seen her since the day his mother died. The
remembrance of her beauty and purity kept him oftentimes from sin; and
when he felt tempted to give utterance to oaths, her soft eyes seemed to
come between him and temptation.

One day he was going across the street to make change for a customer,
when a st