, or my wife's money that you love? Tell me, Jason, I
have often wondered."

My uncle's face also became a flaming red; the veins stood out on his
temples. He tried to speak, but his words choked him.

"Sims," shouted Mr. Lawton. "Sims! Take him out! Take him away!"

My father raised his eyes to the ceiling and sighed.

"Ah Lawton," he said. "Is it possible that you did not know it? Can it
be that you do not understand? Poor Sims is dead, Lawton, a brave man,
but not of good physique. The evening was quite too much for him. Do not
take it so hard, man! We all must die, you among the rest. You should
have known me better, Lawton. You should have known I would not allow
myself to be taken prisoner."

"What!" shouted Mr. Lawton. "What the devil are you then?"

The scene appeared to move my father, for he sighed again, and paused,
the better to enjoy it.

"Only a poor man," he said, "only a poor chattel of the Lord's, a poor
frail jug that has gone too often to the well. A poor man of a blackened
reputation, who has been set upon by spies of France, and threatened in
his own house, but who has managed to escape--" and his voice became
sharp and hard.

"Take Mr. Lawton's pistol, Ned."

There fell a moment's silence in the room while my father, a little in
advance of the rest of us, stared fixedly into my uncle's eyes.

"Set upon by spies," he said, "persecuted and driven. It has set me
thinking, Jason. As I walked back here tonight, I still was thinking, and
can you imagine what was on my mind? It was you, Jason, you and Lawton.
And as I thought of you, my mind fell, as it naturally would, on holy
things, and a piece of the Scripture came back to me. Think of it, Jason,
a piece of the Holy Writ. Would you care to hear it?"

My father paused to adjust a wrinkle in his coat, and then his voice
became solemn and sonorous, and he spoke the words with metrical
precision.

"'To everything'," said my father, "there is a season, and a time to
every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and a time to die'."

He paused long enough to nod from one to the other.

"'A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted'."

He raised his eyes to the ceiling again, and placed the tips of his
fingers together.

"And 'a time to kill'," he concluded gently. His words died softly away
in the quiet room.

"I have often thought of that passage," he continued. "Many and many a
night I have repeated it to myself,