clocks on every Sunday morning. A ceremony
that had always been performed by the two reigning heads of the "family"
in each succeeding generation. It had been Madam's place to walk with
her husband from room to room and stand beside him while with the queer
old keys he wound the weights up from the bottom of the upright cases to
the top, whence they would again begin their slow descent to the bottom,
reaching it as another Lord's Day came around.

Nowadays, Montgomery, as the last of his race, had been promoted to
accompany his grandmother on this clock-winding tour, and had once
innocently asked:

"Did my father use to go with y-you, as I-I-I do?"

Strangely enough, he had never before inquired much about his parents,
but had somehow imbibed the knowledge that both were dead. His father
had once "gone away" and never returned; but his mother had come home,
bringing him an infant, had placed him in the Madam's arms, had taken to
her bed, and had left it only to be carried to the burying-ground on the
hill. Of her the old lady often talked, and once when they had carried
roses to the unmarked grave he had heard her softly quote: "A sweeter
woman ne'er drew breath, than my son's wife, Elizabeth."

But of that son, her own only child, she said nothing till he asked that
unfortunate question. Then she had turned upon him with a face so unlike
her own that he was frightened and needed no command to make him avoid
that subject forever after.

"Your father is--gone; has died to us. Speak of him no more."

The tragedy of her expression haunted him for a time, and he wondered
why she was so much more distressed by mention of her son than of her
husband, since both were dead. However, he soon forgot the matter save
to obey her wish, though afterward this clock-winding, which he had
thought a "bother an' n-n-nuisance," seemed fully as sacred an act as
the church-going which followed it.

This, then, was Montgomery's home and life, and why he who was so petted
and indulged should put himself in hiding, and, of all places, in that
dreadful "secret chamber," puzzled Alfaretta.

"He told me not to tell Madam, an' he told me to bring his supper. How
can I? How dast I? I--I'd be more afraid to go up that stair 'an to walk
through the graveyard alone at midnight. I would so, Ma'am Puss, an' you
keep your nose out that suppawn, I tell you!"

The perturbed little maid felt that it was good to have even a cat to
talk to, and vente