It was now ten years since Captain Pelham's only son, himself at twenty-two the master of a vessel, had married a daughter of James Parsons,--a tall, impulsive, and warm-hearted girl,--one of those girls to whom children always cling. Both James Parsons's daughters had proved attractive and had married well. It had been a disappointment in Captain Pelham's household, perhaps, that this son, their especial pride, should not have married into one of the wealthy families in his own village. At first there had been a little visiting to and fro; it had lasted but a little time, and then the two households had settled down, as the way is in the country, to follow each its own natural course of living. George Pelham's wife had always lived in an odd little house, all doors and windows, near by her father, in her native village. It was from Porto Cabello that that message came,--yellow fever--a short sickness--a burial in a stranger's grave. George Pelham's wife had been for two or three years of less than her usual strength. It was not long after that news came,--came so suddenly, with no warning,--that she began to fade away; and after ten months she died. I remember seeing her a week or two before her death. Her bed had been set up in her little parlor for the convenience of those who were attending upon her. She lay on her back, bolstered up. The paleness of her face was intensified by her coal-black hair, lying back heavy on the pillow. Her hands were thin and transparent, and I remember well the straining look in her eyes as she talked with me about the boy whom she was going to leave. She was living, as I have said, close by her father. It was natural that in the last few days of her illness the child should be taken to her father's house, and when she died and the funeral was over, it was there that he returned.