eeds?

Desist!

'T is too late....

Open is the window, no grating noise has accompanied the unbolting of
the shutter.... The evil spirits have taken care that the faintest sound
shall die away... even the rough iron obeys their voices... it is they
who have bidden: "Be silent; betray him not; he is one of us."

Even the key in the door of the old bureau is turned lightly and without
noise. Groping fingers are searching for a bulky volume. Have they found
it? Is there none there to cry in a voice of thunder: "Cursed be the
father who stretches forth his desecrating hand towards the things that
are his children's"?...

They _have_ found it, the greedy fingers! and now, but a spring through
the open window, and out into the night....

At that moment a sudden ray of light shines through a crack in the door
of the room.... Swiftly the door opens, a girlish figure appears on the
threshold, a lighted lamp in her hand. . . .

"Gudule!" he shrieks, horror-stricken, and falls senseless at her feet.

Ascher was saved. The terrible blow which had struck him down had not
crushed the life from him. He was awakened. But when, after four weeks
of gruesome fever and delirium, his mind had somewhat regained its
equilibrium, his hair had turned white as snow, and his children beheld
an old, decrepit man.

That which Viola had denied her father when he returned to them in all
the vigor of his manhood, she now lavished upon him in his suffering and
helplessness, with that concentrated power of love, the source of which
is not human, but Divine. In the space of one night of terror, the
merest bud of yesterday had suddenly blossomed forth into a flower of
rarest beauty. Never did gentler hands cool a fever-heated brow,
never did sweeter voice mingle its melody with the gruesome dreams of
delirium.

On his sick-bed, lovingly tended by Ephraim and Viola, an ennobling
influence gradually came over the heart of the old gambler, and so
deeply touched it, that calm peace crowned his closing days. It was
strange that the events of that memorable night, and the vicissitudes
that had preceded it, had left no recollection behind, and his children
took good care not to re-awaken, by the slightest hint, his sleeping
memory.

A carriage drew up one day in front of Ascher's house. There has
evidently been a splendid crop of oats this year. Uncle Gabriel has
come. Uncle Gabriel has only lately assumed the additional character of
father-in-la