wild, high voice in the rain--might have been a
banshee's love-song.

"I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie.
She's as pure as the lily in the dell----"

The voice grew louder; came in front of the house; came into the
yard; came and sang just under Cora's window. There it fell silent
a moment; then was lifted in a long peal of imbecile laughter, and
sang again:

"Then slowly, slowly rase she up
And slowly she came nigh him,
And when she drew the curtain by--
`Young man I think you're dyin'.'"

Cora's door opened and closed softly, and Laura, barefooted, stole
to the bed and put an arm about the shaking form of her sister.

"The drunken beast!" sobbed Cora. "It's to disgrace me! That's
what he wants. He'd like nothing better than headlines in the
papers: `Ray Vilas arrested at the Madison residence'!" She choked
with anger and mortification. "The neighbours----"

"They're nearly all away," whispered Laura. "You needn't fear----"

"Hark!"

The voice stopped singing, and began to mumble incoherently; then
it rose again in a lamentable outcry:

"Oh, God of the fallen, be Thou merciful to me! Be Thou
merciful--merciful--_merciful_" . . .

"MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL!" it shrieked, over and over, with
increasing loudness, and to such nerve-racking effect that Cora,
gasping, beat the bedclothes frantically with her hands at each
iteration.

The transom over the door became luminous; some one had lighted
the gas in the upper hall. Both girls jumped from the bed, ran to
the door, and opened it. Their mother, wearing a red wrapper, was
standing at the head of the stairs, which Mr. Madison, in his
night-shirt and slippers, was slowly and heavily descending.

Before he reached the front door, the voice outside ceased its
dreadful plaint with the abrupt anti-climax of a phonograph
stopped in the middle of a record. There was the sound of a
struggle and wrestling, a turmoil in the wet shrubberies, branches
cracking.

"Let me go, da----" cried the voice, drowned again at half a word,
as by a powerful hand upon a screaming mouth.

The old man opened the front door, stepped out, closing it behind
him; and the three women looked at each other wanly during a
hushed interval like that in a sleeping-car at night when the
train stops. Presently he came in again, and started up the
stairs, heavily and slowly, as he had gone down.

"Richard Lindley stopped him," he said, sighing with the as