ain,' and now his foreboding
had the direction that it had wanted before.

"From that on he simply knew that he should not get home alive, and he
waited resignedly for the time and form of his disaster. He had a sort
of peace in that. He went about his business intelligently, and from
habit carefully, but it was with a mechanical action of the mind,
something, he imagined, like the mechanical action of his body in
those organs which do their part without bidding from the will. He was
only a few days in New York, but in the course of them he got several
letters from his wife telling him that all was going well with her and
their daughter. It was before the times when you can ask and answer
questions by telegraph, and he started back, necessarily without
having heard the latest news from home.

"He made the return trip in a sort of daze, talking, reading, eating,
and sleeping in the calm certainty of doom, and only wondering how it
would be fulfilled, and what hour of the night or day. But it is no
use my eking this out; I heard it, as I say, when I was a child, and I
am afraid that if I should try to give it with the full detail I
should take to inventing particulars." Minver paused a moment, and
then he said: "But there was one thing that impressed itself indelibly
on my memory. My uncle got back perfectly safe and well."

"Oh!" Rulledge snorted in rude dissatisfaction.

"What was it impressed itself on your memory?" Wanhope asked, with
scientific detachment from the story as a story.

Minver continued to address Wanhope, without regarding Rulledge. "My
uncle told my father that some sort of psychical change, which he
could not describe, but which he was as conscious of as if it were
physical, took place within him as he came in sight of his house--"

"Yes," Wanhope prompted.

"He had driven down from the canal-packet in the old omnibus which
used to meet passengers and distribute them at their destinations in
town. All the way to his house he was still under the doom as regarded
himself, but bewildered that he should be getting home safe and well,
and he was refusing his escape, as it were, and then suddenly, at the
sight of the familiar house, the change within him happened. He looked
out of the omnibus window and saw a group of neighbors at his gate. As
he got out of the omnibus, my father took him by the hand, as if to
hold him back a moment. Then he said to my father, very quietly, 'You
needn't tell me: my