resting-place, however small, before everybody is dead! But the
children's prospects have to be considered." The continued estrangement
from the old man was an abiding sorrow also, and they had hopes that, if
only they could get to England, he might be persuaded to peace and
charity this time.

At last they were sent home. But the hard old father still would not
relent. He returned their letters unopened. This bitter disappointment
made the Captain's wife so ill that she almost died, and in one month
the Captain's hair became iron gray. He reproached himself for having
ever taken the daughter from her father, "to kill her at last," as he
said. And, thinking of his own children, he even reproached himself for
having robbed the old widower of his only child. After two years at home
his regiment was ordered to India. He failed to effect an exchange, and
they prepared to move once more,--from Chatham to Calcutta. Never before
had the packing, to which she was so well accustomed, been so bitter a
task to the Captain's wife.

It was at the darkest hour of this gloomy time that the Captain came in,
waving above his head a letter which changed all their plans.

Now close by the old home of the Captain's wife there had lived a man,
much older than herself, who yet had loved her with a devotion as great
as that of the young Captain. She never knew it, for, when he saw that
she had given her heart to his young rival, he kept silence, and he
never asked for what he knew he might have had--the old man's authority
in his favor. So generous was the affection which he could never
conquer, that he constantly tried to reconcile the father to his
children while he lived, and, when he died, he bequeathed his house and
small estate to the woman he had loved.

"It will be a legacy of peace," he thought, on his death-bed. "The old
man cannot hold out when she and her children are constantly in sight.
And it may please God that I shall know of the reunion I have not been
permitted to see with my eyes."

And thus it came about that the Captain's regiment went to India without
him, and that the Captain's wife and her father lived on opposite sides
of the same road.

III.

The eldest of the Captain's children was a boy. He was named Robert,
after his grandfather, and seemed to have inherited a good deal of the
old gentleman's character, mixed with gentler traits. He was a fair,
fine boy, tall and stout for his age, with the Captain's r