is sweetheart can scarce be the cause of her son's
detention. Something else must be keeping him. What? So run the
reflections of the fond mother.

At intervals she starts up from her seat, as some sound reaches her;
each time gliding to the door, and gazing out--again to go back
disappointed.

For long periods she remains in the porch, her eye interrogating the
road that runs past the cottage-gate; her ear acutely listening for
footsteps.

Early in the night it has been dark; now there is a brilliant moonlight.
But no man, no form moving underneath it. No sound of coming feet;
nothing that resembles a footfall.

One o'clock, and still silence; to the mother of Charles Clancy become
oppressive, as with increased anxiety she watches and waits.

At intervals she glances at the little "Connecticut" clock that ticks
over the mantel. A pedlar's thing, it may be false, as the men who come
south selling "sech." It is the reflection of a Southern woman, hoping
her conjecture may be true.

But, as she lingers in the porch, and looks at the moving moon, she
knows the hour must be late.

Certain sounds coming from the forest, and the farther swamp, tell her
so. As a backwoods woman she can interpret them. She hears the call of
the turkey "gobbler." She knows it means morning.

The clock strikes two; still she hears no fall of footstep--sees no son
returning!

"Where is my Charles? What can be detaining him?"

Phrases almost identical with those that fell from the lips of Helen
Armstrong, but a few hours before, in a different place, and prompted by
a different sentiment--a passion equally strong, equally pure!

Both doomed to disappointment, alike bitter and hard to bear. The same
in cause, but dissimilar in the impression produced. The sweetheart
believing herself slighted, forsaken, left without a lover; the mother
tortured with the presentiment, she no longer has a son!

When, at a yet later hour--or rather earlier, since it is nigh
daybreak--a dog, his coat disordered, comes gliding through the gate,
and Mrs Clancy recognises her son's favourite hunting hound, she has
still only a presentiment of the terrible truth. But one which to the
maternal heart, already filled with foreboding, feels too like
certainty.

And too much for her strength. Wearied with watching, prostrated by the
intensity of her vigil, when the hound crawls up the steps, and under
the dim light she sees his bedraggled body--blo