oan, listened for the step
she most dreaded, but which, though it sometimes approached, never
passed the opening of the hall leading to her chamber. For one whole
week I sat there, watching her life go slowly out like a flame, with
nothing to feed it; then as the great shadow fell, and life seemed
breaking up within me, I dashed from the place, and confronting him
where I found him walking, pale and disturbed, in his own hall, told him
that my father was coming; that I had had a dream, and in that dream I
had seen my father with his face turned toward this place. Was he
prepared to meet him? Had he an answer ready when Amos Cadwalader should
ask him what had become of his child?

"I had meant to shock the truth from this man, and I did so. As I
mentioned my father's name, Poindexter blanched, and my fears became
certainty. Dropping my youthful manner, for I was a boy no longer, I
flung his crime in his face, and begged him to deny it if he could. He
could not, but he did what neither he nor any other man could do in my
presence now and live--he smiled. Then when he saw me crouching for a
spring--for, young as I was, I knew but one impulse, and that was to fly
at his throat--he put out his powerful hand, and pinning me to the
ground, uttered a few short sentences in my ear.

"They were terrible ones. They made me see that nothing I might then do
could obliterate the fact that she was lost if the world knew what I
knew, or even so much as suspected it; that any betrayal on my part or
act of contrition on his would only pile the earth on her innocent
breast and sink her deeper and deeper into the grave she was then
digging for herself; that all dreams were falsities; that Southern
prisons seldom gave up their victims alive; and that if my father should
escape the jaws of Libby and return, it was for me to be glad if he
found a quiet grave instead of a dishonored daughter. Further, that if I
crossed him, who was power itself, by any boyish exhibition of hate, I
would find that any odium I might invoke would fall on her and not on
him, making me an abhorrence, not only to the world at large, but to the
very father in whose interest I might pretend to act.

"I was young and without worldly experience. I yielded to these
arguments, but I cursed him where he stood. With his hand pressing
heavily upon me, I cursed him to his face; then I went back to my
sister.

"Had she, by some supernatural power, listened to our talk, or