atment, have really done something in
one or other branch of physics. To Emily, who strove to interest herself
in his subjects out of mere love and compassion, he appeared to have
gained not a little knowledge of facts and theories. She liked to
encourage herself in the faith that his attainments were solid as far as
they went, and that they might have been the foundation of good
independent work; it helped her to respect her father.

'Will you come up to-night, Emily?' he asked, with the diffidence which
he always put into this request.

She assented with apparent cheerfulness, and they climbed the stairs
together. The last portion of them was uncarpeted, and their footsteps
sounded with hollow echoes under the roof. It was all but dark by this
time; Mr. Hood found matches on the table and lit the lamp, which
illuminated the bare whitewashed walls and sloping ceiling with a dreary
dimness. There was no carpet on the floor, which creaked as they moved
here and there. When her father was on the point of drawing down the
blind, Emily interposed.

'Do you mind leaving it up, father?'

'Of course I will,' he assented with a smile. 'But why?'

'The last daylight in the sky is pleasant to look at.'

On the landing below stood an old eight-day clock. So much service had
it seen that its voice was grown faint, and the strokes of each hour
that it gave forth were wheezed with intervals of several seconds. It
was now striking nine, and the succession of long-drawn ghostly notes
seemed interminable.

The last daylight--how often our lightest words are omens!--faded out of
the sky. Emily kept her eyes upon the windows none the less. She tried
to understand what her father was saying sufficiently to put in a word
now and then, but her sense of hearing was strained to its utmost for
other sounds. There was no traffic in the road below, and the house
itself was hushed; the ticking of the old clock, performed with such
painful effort that it ever seemed on the point of failing, was the only
sign of life outside the garret. At length Emily's ear caught a remote
rushing sound; her father's low voice did not overcome it.

'These compounds of nitrogen and oxygen,' he was saying, 'are very
interesting. Nitrous oxide, you know, is what they call Laughing Gas.
You heat solid nitrate of ammonia, and that makes protoxide of nitrogen
and water.'

The words conveyed no sense to her, though she heard them. The rushing
sound had become a