t, dark, hollow eyes never would look "right
into hers, away down deep." Yet he loved her, and talked more to her
perhaps than to any one else, not even excepting Aline.

But he never spoke to her of the elder brother whom she could not
remember. It was her mother who whispered something of the story to her,
and told her not to let papa know that she knew of it, for it would
grieve him. Aline herself knew nothing about the boy save that he lived,
and lived a criminal. Jacob himself could only have told her that their
son was a wandering adventurer, known as a blackleg and sharper in every
town in Europe.

The doors of the great house were closed to all the world, or opened
only for some old friend, who went away very soon out of the presence of
a sadness beyond all solace of words, or kindly look, or hand-clasp. And
so, in something that only the grace of their gentle lives relieved
from absolute poverty, those three dwelt in the old house, and let the
world slip by them.

* * * * *

There was no sleep for any one of the little household in the great
house on the night of the 14th of July, 1863. Doors and blinds were
closed; only a light shone through the half-open slats at a second-story
window, and in that room Aline lay sick, almost unto death, her white
hair loosed from its usual dainty neatness, her dark eyes turning with
an unmeaning gaze from the face of the little girl at her side to the
face of her husband at the foot of her bed. Her hands, wrinkled and
small, groped over the coverlet, with nervous twitchings, as every now
and then the howls or the pistol-shots of the mob in the streets below
them fell on her ear. And at every such movement the lips of the girl by
her pillow twitched in piteous sympathy. About half-past twelve there
was sharp firing in volleys to the southward of them, that threw the
half-conscious sufferer into an agony of supersensitive disturbance.
Then there came a silence that seemed unnaturally deep, yet it was only
the silence of a summer night in the deserted city streets.

Through it they heard, sharp and sudden, with something inexplicably
fearful about it, the patter of running feet. They had heard that sound
often enough that night and the night before; but these feet stopped at
their own door, and came up the steps, and the runner beat and pounded
on the heavy panels.

Father and child looked in each other's eyes, and then Jacob Dolph left
his