gs?"

"Yes," Eloise replied. "I am the normal you did not want, and I board
with Mrs. Biggs, where I heard a great deal of Mrs. Amy, as they call
her. I must have a slow, stupid mind, or I should have suspected who she
was. I never heard the name Harris connected with her. If I had I should
have known. It is so clear to me now."

The Colonel looked at her a moment, and then said, "If you are Amy's
daughter you are a Harris, and they are queer, with slow minds,--and now
go. I am infernally tired, and cannot keep up much longer."

He moved his hand toward her, and Eloise took it and pressed it to her
lips.

"D-don't," the Colonel said, but held fast to the soft, warm hand
clasping his. "If one's life could roll back," he added, more to himself
than to Eloise, as his head dropped wearily upon his breast, and he
whispered, "I am sorry for a great deal. God knows I am sorry. Call
Peter."

The old servant came and got him to bed, and sat by him most of the
night. Toward morning, finding that he was sleeping quietly, he, too,
lay down and slept until the early sun was shining into the room. Waking
with a start, he hurried to his master's side, to find him with
wide-open eyes full of terror as he tried to ask what had happened to
him. All power to move except his head was gone, and when he tried to
talk his lips gave only inarticulate sounds which no one could
understand.

"Paralysis," the doctor said when summoned. "I have expected it a long
time," he continued, and would give no hope to Amy and Eloise, who
hastened to the sick-room.

The moment they came in the Colonel's eyes brightened, and when Amy
stooped and kissed him he tried to kiss her back. Then he fixed his eyes
on Eloise with a questioning glance, which made her say to him, "Do you
know me?"

He struggled hard for a moment, and then replied, "Yesh, 'Lisha Ann!
Stay!" and those were the only really intelligible words he ever spoke.

They telegraphed to Worcester for Howard, and learning that he was in
Boston, telegraphed there, and found him at the Vendome. "Come at once.
Your uncle is dying," the telegram said, and Howard read it with a
sensation for which he hated himself, and which he could not entirely
shake off. He tried to believe he did not want his uncle to die, but if
he did die, what might it not do for him, the only direct heir, if Amy
were not a lawful daughter? And he did not believe she was. She had not
been adopted, and he had never heard