“Alive but better dead,” was all that the superintendent could find breath to say as he ran beside Jack toward the carriage and leaped in. “Stop for nothing; put the horses to a gallop,” commanded Mr. Dunlap, leaning out of the carriage window and addressing the coachman as he wheeled his horses around and turned upon the street. It was at an early hour on Sunday morning when the Dunlaps landed and the streets were freed from the week day traffic and the number of vehicles that usually crowded them. As the swaying carriage dashed along, Chapman was unable to make the recently arrived men understand more than that Lucy had suddenly become deranged as a result of her illness, and that this appalling circumstance, in connection with his idolized granddaughter’s severe sickness had produced a paralytic stroke, that had rendered powerless the entire right side of James Dunlap’s body; that his vitality was so low and his whole constitution seemed so shaken and undermined by the events of the last few weeks, that the physicians despaired of his life. As the foaming horses were halted before the entrance of the Dunlap mansion, Mr. John Dunlap jumped from the still swaying vehicle and ran up the steps, heedless of Mrs. Church and the servants in the hall, he rushed straight to the well remembered room where, as boys, he and his brother had slept, and which was still the bed-chamber occupied by Mr. James Dunlap. John Dunlap opened the door and for a moment faltered on the threshold; then that voice he loved so well called out, “Is that my brother John?” The stricken man had recognized his brother’s footsteps. An instant more and John Dunlap had thrown himself across the bed and his arms were around his brother; for several minutes those two hearts, which in unison had beaten since first the life-blood pulsated through them, were pressed together. James Dunlap’s left hand weakly patting his brother. David Chapman had followed, close upon the heels of John Dunlap and was crouching at the bottom of the bed, with his face hidden by the bed-clothing that covered his old master’s feet, and was silently sobbing. When Jack Dunlap entered the hall good Mrs. Church, who had been a second mother to him while he lived at the Dunlap house in his school boy days, ran to him and throwing her arms about his neck fell upon his broad breast, weeping and crying, “My boy is home! Thank God for sending you, Jack. We have suffered so, and needed you so much, my boy!” When the sailor man had succeeded in pacifying the distressed old housekeeper and disengaged himself from her embrace, he hastened after Chapman. As he entered the room and stepped near the bed he heard a feeble voice which he scarcely recognized as that of Mr. James Dunlap, say,