ed
and calm. A smile seemed to be playing about the lips. The face had
all its wonted color and fulness, and one might well have thought,
looking on the closed eye-lids, that he lay asleep.

Standing thus in the presence of death, the boy had no fear. His only
feeling was one of tenderness and of deep sorrow. The man had been so
kind to him in life, so very kind. It seemed almost as though the lips
might part and speak to him. But he was dead; this was his face, this
his body; but he, himself, was not here. Dead! The word struck harshly
on his mind and roused him from his reverie. He looked up; the boys
had all gone, only the kind-faced woman stood there with a puzzled
expression in her eyes. She had chanced to mark the strong resemblance
between the face of the dead man and that of the boy who looked upon
it; a resemblance so striking that it startled her. In the countenance
of Robert Burnham as he had looked in life, one might not have noticed
it, but--

"Sometimes, in a dead man's face,
To those that watch it more and more,
A likeness, hardly seen before,
Comes out, to some one of his race."

It was so here. The faces of the dead man and of the living boy were
the faces of father and son.

Ralph turned away, at last, from the lifeless presence before him,
from the searching eyes of the woman, from the hall with its dim
suggestions of something in the long ago, and went out into the
street, into the sunlight, into the busy world around him; but from
that time forth a shadow rested on his young life that had never
darkened it before,--a shadow whose cause he could not fathom and
whose gloom he could not dispel.

CHAPTER V.

IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER.

Three months had gone by since the accident at Burnham Shaft. They
were summer months, full of sunshine and green landscapes and singing
birds and blossoming flowers and all things beautiful. But in the
house from which the body of Robert Burnham had been carried to the
grave there were still tears and desolation. Not, indeed, as an
outward show; Margaret Burnham was very brave, and hid her grief
under a calm exterior, but there were times, in the quiet of her own
chamber, when loneliness and sorrow came down upon her as a burden
too great for her woman's heart to bear. Still, she had her daughter
Mildred, and the child's sweet ways and ceaseless chatter and fond
devotion charmed her, now and then, into something almost like
forgetfulness. She