oy was seven years old.

V

Meantime, General Hampden was facing a new foe. His health had suddenly
given way, and he was in danger of becoming blind. His doctor had given
him his orders--orders which possibly he might not have taken had not
the spectre of a lonely old man in total darkness begun to haunt him. He
had been "working too hard," the doctor told him.

"Working hard! Of course, I have been working hard!" snapped the
General, fiercely, with his black eyes glowering. "What else have I to
do but work? I shall always work hard."

The doctor knew something of the General 's trouble. He had been a
surgeon in the hospital where young Oliver Hampden had been when Lucy
Drayton found him.

"You must stop," he said, quietly. "You will not last long unless you
do."

"How long!" demanded the General, quite calmly.

"Oh! I cannot say that. Perhaps, a year--perhaps, less. You have burned
your candle too fast." He glanced at the other's unmoved face. "You need
change. You ought to go South this winter."

"I should only change my skies and not my thoughts," said the General,
his memory swinging back to the past.

The doctor gazed at him curiously. "What is the use of putting out your
eyes and working yourself to death when you have everything that money
can give?"

"I have nothing! I work to forget that," snarled the General, fiercely.

The doctor remained silent.

The General thought over the doctor's advice and finally followed it,
though not for the reason the physician supposed.

Something led him to select the place where his son had gone and where
his body lay amid the magnolias. If he was going to die, he would carry
out a plan which he had formed in the lonely hours when he lay awake
between the strokes of the clock. He would go and see that his son's
grave was cared for, and if he could, would bring him back home at last.
Doubtless, "that woman's" consent could be bought. She had possibly
married again. He hoped she had.

VI

Christmas is always the saddest of seasons to a lonely man, and General
Hampden, when he landed in that old Southern town on the afternoon of
Christmas Eve, would not have been lonelier in a desert. The signs of
Christmas preparation and the sounds of Christmas cheer but made him
lonelier. For years, flying from the Furies, he had immersed himself
in work and so, in part, had forgotten his troubles; but the removal of
this prop let him fall flat to the earth.

A