except to send her at Christmas a hundred dollars, which he said was for
the boy Harold, to whom he had done an injustice.

After this he seldom went out, but gave himself heart and soul to the
completion of his rooms, and when they were finished he settled down
into the life of a recluse, seeing very few and talking but little,
except occasionally to himself, when he seemed to be carrying on a
conversation with some unseen visitant, who must have spoken in a
foreign tongue or tongues, for sometimes it was French, sometimes
Italian, and oftener German, in which he addressed his fancied guest,
and neither Frank nor Dolly could understand a word of the strange
jargon. On the whole, however, he was very quiet and undemonstrative,
and but for the habit of talking to himself and smelling odors where
there were none, he would not have seemed very different from many
peculiar people who are never suspected of being crazy.

If he were still expecting Gretchen, he gave no sign of it, except the
place at his table always laid for her, and Frank was beginning to
breathe freely, and to look upon his brother's presence in the house as
not altogether unbearable, when an event occurred which excited all
Shannondale, and for a time made Frank almost as crazy as his brother.

CHAPTER XI.

THE STORM.

The winter since Christmas had been unusually severe, and the oldest
inhabitant, of whom there are always many in every town, pronounced the
days as they came and went the coldest they had ever known. Ten, twelve,
and even fourteen degrees below zero the thermometers marked more than
once, while old Peterkin's, which was hung inside the Lizy Ann and
always took the lead, went down one morning to seventeen, and all the
water-pipes and pumps in town either froze or burst, and Arthur Tracy,
who, with his absorption of self, never forgot the poor, sent tons and
tons of coal to them, and whispered to himself:

'Poor Gretchen! It is hard for her if she is on the sea in such weather
as this. Heaven protect her, poor little Gretchen!'

That night when Frank went, as his custom was, to sit a few moments with
his brother, he found him on his knees, with his face toward the
picture, repeating the prayer for those upon the sea.

The next day there was a change for the better, and the next, and the
next, until when the last day of February dawned Peterkin's thermometer
registered only two, and people began to show themselves in the
st