as the gateway to heaven, and find it shut!
May your children, if you are cursed with them, turn in your face, as
you are turning now in mine! May the lightning of heaven be your candle,
and the blackness of death your daily food and your nightly drink!' And
with a look in which all the terrors he invoked, seemed to crash
downward from his reeling brain upon her shrinking terror-crouched head,
he gave one mighty gasp and fell back stricken to the floor.

"'God!' burst from her lips, and she rushed downwards to the door like a
creature hunted to its quarry. I saw her white face gleam marble-like in
the fading light that came in from the chinks about the door. I saw her
trembling hand fumbling with the knob, and rousing from my stupor,
called down to her with all the force of a breaking heart,

"'Jacqueline, beware!'

"She turned once more. There was something in my voice she could not
withstand. 'I do not hope to keep you,' cried I, 'but before you go,
hear this. In the days to come, when the face that now beams upon you
with such longing, shall have learned to turn from you in weariness, if
not distaste, when hunger, cold, contumely and disease shall have
blasted that fair brow and seared those soft cheeks, know, that although
a father can curse, a woman who loves like a mother can forgive. The
father cries, 'Once go out of that door and it shuts upon you never to
open!' 'Once come to _that_ door, say I,' pointing in the direction of
the house's other entrance, 'and if I live and if I move, it shall open
to you, were you as defiled and wretched and forsaken as Magdalen.
Remember! Each day at this hour will I watch for you, kneeling upon its
threshold. In sickness or in health, in joy or in sorrow, in cold or in
heat. The hour of six is sacred. Some one of them shall see you falling
weeping on my breast!'

"She gave me a quick stare out of her wide black eyes, then a mocking
smile curled her lips, and murmuring a short, 'You rave!' opened the
door, and rushed out into the falling dusk. With a resounding clang like
the noise of a stone rolled upon an open grave, the great door swung to,
and I was left alone in that desolated house with my stricken master.

XXVII.

THE LONE WATCHER.

"Hark! to the hurried question of Despair,
Where is my child?--and Echo answers--Where?"

--BYRON.

"Colonel Japha recovered from his shock, but was never the same man
again. All that was genial, affectionate and