re to visit
the South, nor was her temperament one to evoke or sympathise with
sentimental reminiscence. He had married, rather late in life, a New
York woman, much younger than himself; and while he had admired her
beauty and they had lived very pleasantly together, there had not
existed between them the entire union of souls essential to perfect
felicity, and the current of his life had not been greatly altered by
her loss.

Toward little Phil, however, the child she had borne him, his feeling
was very different. His young wife had been, after all, but a sweet
and pleasant graft upon a sturdy tree. Little Phil was flesh of his
flesh and bone of his bone. Upon his only child the colonel lavished
all of his affection. Already, to his father's eye, the boy gave
promise of a noble manhood. His frame was graceful and active. His
hair was even more brightly golden than his mother's had been; his
eyes more deeply blue than hers; while his features were a duplicate
of his father's at the same age, as was evidenced by a faded
daguerreotype among the colonel's few souvenirs of his own childhood.
Little Phil had a sweet temper, a loving disposition, and endeared
himself to all with whom he came in contact.

The hack, after a brief passage down the main street, deposited the
passengers at the front of the Clarendon Hotel. The colonel paid the
black driver the quarter he demanded--two dollars would have been the
New York price--ran the gauntlet of the dozen pairs of eyes in the
heads of the men leaning back in the splint-bottomed armchairs under
the shade trees on the sidewalk, registered in the book pushed forward
by a clerk with curled mustaches and pomatumed hair, and accompanied
by Phil, followed the smiling black bellboy along a passage and up one
flight of stairs to a spacious, well-lighted and neatly furnished
room, looking out upon the main street.

_Three_

When the colonel and Phil had removed the dust and disorder of travel
from their appearance, they went down to dinner. After they had eaten,
the colonel, still accompanied by the child, left the hotel, and
following the main street for a short distance, turned into another
thoroughfare bordered with ancient elms, and stopped for a moment
before an old gray house with high steps and broad piazza--a large,
square-built, two-storied house, with a roof sloping down toward the
front, broken by dormer windows and buttressed by a massive brick
chimney at either