of the previous night.
Now and then, as the children played about her, a shadow crept over
her face--a shadow as of cold remembrance--and then the perplexed tears
followed.

When she seemed as well as ever they put her back in her room. But
though the fire glowed and the lamp burned, as soon as ever she was
alone they heard her shrill cries ringing to them that the Evil Thought
had come again. So Hal, who was home from college, carried her up to his
room, which she seemed to like very well. Then he went down to have a
smoke before grandma's fire.

The next morning he was absent from breakfast. They thought he might
have gone for an early walk, and waited for him a few minutes. Then
his sister went to the room that looked upon the larches, and found him
dressed and pacing the floor with a face set and stern. He had not been
in bed at all, as she saw at once. His eyes were bloodshot, his face
stricken as if with old age or sin or--but she could not make it out.
When he saw her he sank in a chair and covered his face with his hands,
and between the trembling fingers she could see drops of perspiration on
his forehead.

"Hal!" she cried, "Hal, what is it?"

But for answer he threw his arms about the little table and clung to
it, and looked at her with tortured eyes, in which she fancied she saw
a gleam of hate. She ran, screaming, from the room, and her father came
and went up to him and laid his hands on the boy's shoulders. And then
a fearful thing happened. All the family saw it. There could be no
mistake. Hal's hands found their way with frantic eagerness toward his
father's throat as if they would choke him, and the look in his eyes was
so like a madman's that his father raised his fist and felled him as he
used to fell men years before in the college fights, and then dragged
him into the sitting-room and wept over him.

By evening, however, Hal was all right, and the family said it must have
been a fever,--perhaps from overstudy,--at which Hal covertly smiled.
But his father was still too anxious about him to let him out of his
sight, so he put him on a cot in his room, and thus it chanced that the
mother and Grace concluded to sleep together downstairs.

The two women made a sort of festival of it, and drank little cups of
chocolate before the fire, and undid and brushed their brown braids,
and smiled at each other, understandingly, with that sweet intuitive
sympathy which women have, and Grace told her mothe