ng, curly head, and dark, clear
cheeks, carnation-tinted, would have been thought by many quite as
charming a specimen of American girlhood as the stately pale brunette who
swayed her brother's affections.

"Come for a walk, chicken! It is much too pretty a night to go indoors,"
he said.

"Yes, and furnish ears for Madeline's praises, with a few more reflected
compliments for pay, perhaps," she replied, contemptuously. "Besides,"
she added, "I must go into the house and keep father company. I only came
out to cool off after baking the cake. You'd better come in too. These
moonlight nights always make him specially sad, you know."

The brother and sister had been left motherless not long before, and
Laura, in trying to fill her mother's place in the household, so far as
she might, was always looking out that her father should have as little
opportunity as possible to brood alone over his companionless condition.

CHAPTER II.

That same night toward morning Henry suddenly awoke from a sound sleep.
Drowsiness, by some strange influence, had been completely banished from
his eyes, and in its stead he became sensible of a profound depression of
spirits. Physically, he was entirely comfortable, nor could he trace to
any sensation from without either this sudden awakening or the mental
condition in which he found himself. It was not that he thought of
anything in particular that was gloomy or discouraging, but that all the
ends and aims, not only of his own individual life, but of life in
general, had assumed an aspect so empty, vain, and colourless, that he
felt he would not rise from his bed for anything existence had to offer.
He recalled his usual frame of mind, in which these things seemed
attractive, with a dull wonderment that so baseless a delusion should be
so strong and so general. He wondered if it were possible that it should
ever again come over him.

The cold, grey light of earliest morning, that light which is rather the
fading of night than the coming of day, filled the room with a faint hue,
more cheerless than pitchiest darkness. A distant bell, with slow and
heavy strokes, struck three. It was the dead point in the daily
revolution of the earth's life, that point just before dawn, when men
oftenest die; when surely, but for the force of momentum, the course of
nature would stop, and at which doubtless it will one day pause
eternally, when the clock is run down. The long-drawn reverberations of