s future was to give ample proof. Again in
vision he stood before that assembly and spoke for the lowly and
oppressed. "Let every man have place and honor as he proves himself
worthy. Make the way clear for all."

Through the bewilderment of applause that greeted him as he finished he
saw only the glad, smiling face of Alice Wentworth nodding approval of
the rest, hundreds though they were, he saw nothing. Her congratulation
was enough.

Then came tenderer scenes, and Alice Wentworth was to be his wife.
Another change, and he is in the midst of ruder scenes. There is war,
civil war, and he is a soldier, once more he seems to be in Virginia,
and there are marches and counter-marches, camps and barracks, battles
and retreats, and all the great and little miseries of long campaigns.
The silver leaflets of a major are exchanged for the golden eagles of a
colonel, and all the time, amid sterner duties, he finds time to write
to Alice Wentworth, and never a mail comes into camp but he is sure of
letters dated 'Home' and full of words that make him hopeful and brave,
"'Home!' Yes hers and mine too, if home's where the heart is!'" he
thinks, and he loves her more dearly every day.

Negro troops are raised, and, true to his principles and to himself, he
resigns his commission to take a lower rank in a colored regiment. Now
the scenes grow dim, confused sounds far off disturb him, low music,
familiar yet strange, now distant, now at his very ear, attracts him, a
weird, shadowy mist encloses him, concealing even the things which were
visible to the mind's eye, and memory and thought have almost ceased.
Yet while all else fades away, clear and beautiful before him are two
faces that cannot be forgotten--his mother's face, and that other, which
he loves, if that can be, even more. Thus, with the 'Our Father' not on
his lips, but fixed in his mind, he feels himself drifting
away--drifting away like a boat that has broken its moorings and drifts
out with the ebbing tide--whither?

But the rich, warm, lusty blood of the African quickly does its work.
The heart, which had almost ceased to beat, because there was not blood
enough for it to contract upon, reacted to the stimulus, and as it
revived and sent the new life pulsating through all the body the whole
man revived, and again:

The fever called _living_ burned in his brain.

Fournier, under one pretext or another, but really by the force of his
relentless will, kept his victi