swift dog. He
thought with a certain anxiety of the tawny tiny owl that had sat like
a stuffed ornament on the mantel-piece of a neighboring room, and he
listened with a quaking vicarious presentiment of woe for the sounds of
capture and despair. He was sensible of waiting and hoping for the fox's
bootless return, when he suddenly lost consciousness.

How long he slept he did not know, but it seemed only a momentary
respite from the torture of memory, when, still in the darkness,
thousands of tremulous penetrating sounds were astir, and with a great
start he recognized the rain on the roof. It was coming down in steady
torrents that made the house rock before the tumult of his plunging
heart was still, and he was longing again for the forgetfulness of
sleep. In vain. The hours dragged by; the windows slowly, slowly denned
their dull gray squares against the dull gray day dawning without.
The walls that had been left with only the first dark coat of plaster,
awaiting another season for the final decoration, showed their drapings
of cobweb, and the names and pencilled scribblings with which the fancy
of transient bushwhackers had chosen to deface them. The locust-trees
within the quadrangle drearily tossed their branches to and fro in the
wind, the bark very black and distinct against the persistent gray lines
of rain and the white walls of the galleried buildings opposite; the
gutters were brimming, roaring along like miniature torrents; nowhere
was the fox or the owl to be seen. Somehow their presence would have
been a relief--the sight of any living thing reassuring. As he walked
slowly along the deserted piazzas, in turning sudden corners, again and
again he paused, expecting that something, some one, was approaching to
meet him. When at last he mounted his horse, that had neighed gleefully
to see him, and rode away through the avenue and along the empty ways
among the untenanted summer cottages, all the drearier and more forlorn
because of the rain, he felt as if he had left an aberration, some
hideous dream, behind, instead of the stark reality of the gaunt and
vacant and dilapidated old house.

The transition to the glow and cheer of Sim Roxby's fireside was like
a rescue, a restoration. The smiling welcome in the women's eyes, their
soft drawling voices, with mellifluous intonations that gave a value to
each commonplace simple word, braced his nerves like a tonic. It might
have been only the contrast with the re