After half an hour’s drive over the heavy rain-soaked clay roads, they reached their destination. She could have shrieked aloud when she saw the new house before her in all its desolation and ruin. Wretched mud farm-buildings; a swampy yard; a low dwelling-house with a shingle roof, from the walls of which the chalk had crumbled down and showed the bare wall underneath; a wilderness of a garden, in which the last sad remains of the summer asters and sunflowers stood among half-decayed vegetables, round about a gaudy painted fence, which seemed to have received extreme unction just before its end--this was the place where the family of the ruined squire had to live henceforth. This was the place where little Paul grew up, and to which the love of his childhood, the care of half his life was devoted. He was in his early years a delicate, sickly creature, and many a night his mother trembled lest the feeble light of his life should be extinguished before dawn. At such times she would sit in the dark, low bedroom, leaning her elbow on the edge of his little bed, gazing with feverish eyes at his little thin body, which was painfully convulsed by spasms. But he passed all the crises of his early childhood, and at five years old, though pale and weak of limb and almost careworn in face--for he had really retained the old look--he was a healthy boy, who gave promise of long life. At this time his first recollections begin. The earliest, which in after-years he often recalled, was as follows: The room is half dark. Icicles are clinging to the windows, and through the curtains shines the red glow of the sunset. The elder brothers have gone skating, but he is in his little bed--for he has to go to bed early--and near him sits his mother, one hand encircling his neck, and the other on the edge of the cradle, in which the two little sisters sleep, which Master Stork brought a year ago, both on the same day. “Mamma, tell me a fairy tale,” he pleads. And his mother told him one. What? He could only remember very faintly, but there was something in it about a gray woman who had visited his mother in all her sad hours, a woman with a pale and haggard face, and dark, tear-stained eyes. She had come like a shadow, like a shadow she had gone, had extended her hands over his mother’s head, she knew not whether for a blessing or for a curse, and had spoken words which had reference to him--little Paul. In them there was the question of sacrifice and of redemption; the words he had forgotten again--probably he was too stupid to understand them. But one thing still remained clearly enough: while he listened to his mother’s words, breathless with terror and expectation, he suddenly saw the gray figure of whom she spoke, bodily standing at the door--exactly the same, with her arms uplifted, and her pale, sad face. He hid his head on his mother’s arm; his heart beat, his breath began to fail him, and, in deadly terror, he screamed out,