ssion on it that almost froze his
blood, looked at him for a moment, then silently passed up the room,
and with her dress brushing him as he sat there motionless, paused
beside the couch. And it was thus that Nea and her father met again.
But she did not notice him; there was only one object for her
eyes--the still, mute figure of her boy. Silently, and still with that
awful look of woe on her face, she drew the dark head into her arms,
and laid the dead cheek against her breast; and as she felt the
irresponsive weight, the chilled touch, her dried-up misery gave way,
and the tears streamed from her eyes.

She was calling him her darling--her only boy.

She had forgotten his cowardly desertion of her; the faults and
follies of his youth. Living, he had been little to her, but she
claimed the dead as her own. She had forgotten all; she was the young
mother again, as she smoothed the dark hair with her thin fingers and
pressed the cold face closer to her bosom, as though she could warm
the deadly chill of death.

"Nea," exclaimed a feeble voice in her ear. "Nea, he was my boy too."
And looking up, she saw the tall bowed figure of her father, and two
wrinkled hands stretched out to her. Ah, she was back in the present
again. She laid her boy down on the pillow, and drew the quilt
tenderly over him; but all the beauty and softness seemed to die out
of her face, as she turned to her father.

"My boy," she answered, "not yours; for you never loved him as I did.
You tempted him from me, and made him despise his mother; but he is
mine now; God took him from you who were ruining him soul and body, to
give him back to me."

"Nea," returned the old man with a groan, "I have sinned--I know it
now. I have blighted your life; I have been a hard cruel father; but
in the presence of the dead there should be peace."

"My life," she moaned; "my life. Ah, if that were all I could have
forgiven it long ago; but it was Maurice--Maurice whom you left to die
of a broken heart, though I prayed you to come with me. It was my
husband whom you killed; and now, but for you my boy would be living."

"Nea, Nea," he wailed again; "my only child, Nea;" but as she turned,
moved by the concentrated agony of his voice, he fell with his face
downward on the couch, across the feet of his dead grandson.

* * * * *

The doctors who were summoned said that a paralytic seizure had long
been impending; he might linger f