tabernacle.

"Ivory would be the prince of our house," he thought. "Oh! how I'd like
to be Ivory's rod and have it be the one that was chosen to blossom and
keep the rebels from murmuring!"

XXI. LOIS BURIES HER DEAD

THE replies that Ivory had received from his letters of inquiry
concerning his father's movements since leaving Maine, and his possible
death in the West, left no reasonable room for doubt. Traces of Aaron
Boynton in New Hampshire, in Massachusetts, in New York, and finally
in Ohio, all pointed in one direction, and although there were gaps and
discrepancies in the account of his doings, the fact of his death seemed
to be established by two apparently reliable witnesses.

That he was not unaccompanied in his earliest migrations seemed clear,
but the woman mentioned as his wife disappeared suddenly from the
reports, and the story of his last days was the story of a broken-down,
melancholy, unfriended man, dependent for the last offices on strangers.
He left no messages and no papers, said Ivory's correspondent, and never
made mention of any family connections whatsoever. He had no property
and no means of defraying the expenses of his illness after he was
stricken with the fever. No letters were found among his poor effects
and no article that could prove his identity, unless it were a small
gold locket, which bore no initials or marks of any kind, but which
contained two locks of fair and brown hair, intertwined. The tiny
trinket was enclosed in the letter, as of no value, unless some one
recognized it as a keepsake. Ivory read the correspondence with a heavy
heart, inasmuch as it corroborated all his worst fears. He had sometimes
secretly hoped that his father might return and explain the reason of
his silence; or in lieu of that, that there might come to light
the story of a pilgrimage, fanatical, perhaps, but innocent of evil
intention, one that could be related to his wife and his former friends,
and then buried forever with the death that had ended it.

Neither of these hopes could now ever be realized, nor his father's
memory made other than a cause for endless regret, sorrow, and shame.
His father, who had begun life so handsomely, with rare gifts of mind
and personality, a wife of unusual beauty and intelligence, and while
still young in years, a considerable success in his chosen profession.
His poor father! What could have been the reasons for so complete a
downfall?

Ivory asked D