th the
boundless audacity of youth.

"Could you find use for the silver?" asked his father humorously.

Jack flushed, and lapsed into dreams. Grandmother opposite was nodding
in her chair, her knitting still in her fingers. Jack left his vision
for a moment, to calculate if the old chest upstairs was not nearly full
of stockings. His mother sat sewing some trifle, and just raised her
eyes with that longing, beseeching glance mothers so often give to their
sons.

"If women only did not care so much for one," thought Jack, "or if there
had been a great family of us. And still I can't see the wonderful
difference between going to college, and going to seek your fortune.
Does two or three hundred miles more matter when you are once away?"

The snow came on through the night. There being nothing urgent on hand,
Mr. Darcy remained within; but Jack buffeted the storm gallantly. It
would be worse than this out in the new countries where he meant to go
some time.

The next day Mr. Darcy was out. There was a dull pain in his breast,
going through to his back, and he coughed a little. It went on thus for
forty-eight hours, when the pain became intense, and fever set in. Dr.
Kendrick was summoned; and, though the case was severe, it had no
alarming symptoms at first. Jack went to and fro with his merry whistle;
speculative he might be, but he was not introspective or morbid: wife
and mother watched at home.

There came one of those sudden and inexplicable turns in the disease.
Jack was stunned, incredulous. In his mother's eyes lay a look of
helpless terror he was never to forget.

"You'll care for them always, Jack; you'll never leave them," said his
father imploringly, in one lucid interval.

"Always," answered the young voice bravely.

"Thank you, my son, my dear boy;" and there was a fervent clasp of the
hand.

A few days later Bernard Darcy lay coffined in the pretty parlor, while
wife and mother were crushed with grief.

"Dust to dust, ashes to ashes;" and Jack dropped the first handful of
earth in his father's open grave. The two women clung to him,--he was
their all. Here lay his duty as long as God pleased.

It seemed for weeks after this as if Mrs. Darcy would follow her
husband. She looked so white and wan, she was so feeble that some days
she could not leave her bed. Grandmother rallied with that invincible
determination not to be beaten down if her prop was wrenched away.

Jack was now a few months pas