her
was giving his orders.

"'Reuben is a man now, and I have asked him more than once since
then how the general looked at that critical instant. It is
important to me, very, very important, and to him, too, now that
he has come to know a man's passions and temptations. But he will
never tell me, never relieve my mind, and I can only hope that
there were real signs of illness on the general's brow; for then I
could feel that all had been right and that his death was the
natural result of the great distress he felt at opposing my father
in the one desire of his heart. That glimpse which Reuben had of
him before he fell has always struck me with strange pathos. A
little child looking in upon a man, who, for all his apparent
health, will in another moment be in eternity--I do not wonder he
does not like to talk of it, and yet--

"'It was Samba who came upon the general first. Our father had not
yet descended. When he did, it was with loud cries and piteous
ejaculations. Word had gone upstairs and surprised him in the room
with my mother. I recollect wondering in all childish simplicity
why he wrung his hands so over the death of a man he so hated and
feared. Nor was it till years had passed and our mother had been
laid in the grave and the house had settled into a gloom too heavy
and somber for Reuben to endure, that I recognized in my father the
signs of a settled remorse. These I endeavored to account for by
the fact that he had been saved from what he looked upon as political
death by the sudden but opportune decease of his best friend. This
caused a shock to his feelings which had unnerved him for life.
Don't you think this the true explanation of his invariably moody
brow and the great distaste he always showed for this same library?
Though he would live in no other house, he would not enter that
room nor look at the gloomy settle from which the general had fallen
to his death. The place was virtually tabooed, and though, as the
necessity arose, it was opened from time to time for great
festivities, the shadow it had acquired never left it and my father
hated its very door until he died. Is it not natural that his
daughter should share this feeling?'

"It was, and I said so; but I would say no more, though she cast me
little appealing looks which acquired an eery significance from the
pressure of her small fingers on my arm and the wailing sound of
the wind which at that moment blew down in one gust