Twenty years ago he had seen her last in this room, and he was to see her again to-night. A singular feeling tightened about his heart. When we have watched through a long vigil with a great and agonizing sorrow, when we have rebelled against it, and battled and fought with the air, in our vain outcry against its injustice, when we have longed and wept and prayed for release in vain, and then, at last, have laid it in its ashes and stood beside that open grave, which yawns sooner or later in every past, then--the coming of its ghost is bitter with the bitterness of death. It was the coming of the ghost for which Colonel Royall waited in the gathering dusk, the ghost who must walk over the white ashes of his love and his outraged honor. For twenty years he had hidden the mother’s sin from the daughter, he had made her memory sweet to her child. And his requital? She had tried to rob him of that one comfort of his life, to take his daughter away, to estrange them in his hour of need. In that hour even that gentle and simple heart knew its own bitterness. He recalled every incident of that unhappy past, he recalled her beauty and her indifference; again and again he had questioned himself, had the fault been his? He had loved much and forgiven much, yet it might be that he had given her cause for weariness. Had the narrow routine of life which made his happiness fretted her? If he had let her spread her butterfly wings in other and gayer climes, would she have been more content to return at last? Perhaps,--he did not know. Fallacious thought! No human being can hold captive another’s will except by that one magic talisman, and love for David Royall had never really lived in his wife’s heart. Marriage to some women is a brilliant fête, and a preventive of the reproach which they fondly believe would attach to them in single-blessedness; marriage is a poultice for the ills of society, and the latch-key to the social front door, permitting more freedom of entrance and exit. Yet it is a poultice which some are exceedingly anxious to tear off after a short application. The young and beautiful Letty had tried it twice and was still suffering from its effects; she had found it, in both instances, grown cold and lumpy. Yet, so adorable had been her youthful ways, so sweet and engaging her manner, that this poor man, who had been the husband of her youth, sat in the twilight, searching his heart again for reasons for her discontent, no living man having really mastered the ways of woman. Night had fallen in the room, but the hemlock bough was still outlined against the pane, for the moon was rising. Presently, Kingdom-Come came in softly and lit the tall old candelabrum on the mantel; he was going on, with a noiseless step, to the other lights, but the colonel stopped him. “Has no one come yet?” he asked, as the negro, leaving the lamps, arranged the fire. “Not yet, Marse David.”