Michael Langstroth, with his superb constitution and youth and temperance to back him, and with the devoted nursing of two such friends as Roger and the doctor, was in the course of a few weeks restored to comparative strength. Gradually the shades and ghosts, the bats and owls that haunt the dark places of the human mind, retired before gathering physical strength. Things were gone that could never be restored—hopes, joys, faiths, enthusiasms; things which had once seemed all-important, appeared now almost too insignificant for notice. Under Roger’s eyes was the process accomplished which in his blindness he had long ago wished for his friend. He was made into a man: going into the valley of the shadow a youth, for all his six and twenty years, his bone, and his muscle, and his brain; coming out of it alive, sane, whole, if weak, but stripped of every superfluous hope, confidence, or youthfulness. It was November when he went to his room that night; it was the very end of December when he came out of it, a hollow-eyed spectre enough. And it was a month later still when Dr. Rowntree carried him down to Hastings one day, returning himself the next, and leaving his adopted son there to recruit. So ended Michael Langstroth’s youth, as a tale that is told. CHAPTER XI OTHO’S LETTER-BAG A November morning, five years later. The sky gray and brooding, the trees still and leafless. Everything outside betokened the drear season of the year, and even the trimly kept lawns of Thorsgarth could not give brightness to this mood of Nature and the time o’ day. Within, in a small room which he generally used for breakfasting, Otho Askam stood on the hearthrug, with his burly back turned towards a large fire. A letter was in his hand, to which he seemed to pay more attention than it was usually his habit to give to his correspondence, for he turned it about, and perused it often. What are the changes which five years may have wrought in his traits, or how many of them have become strengthened and accentuated during that time?