CHAPTER XLVII. AN UNEXPECTED RETURN. CHAPTER XLVIII. PEACE AT LAST. GEOFFREY’S VICTORY. CHAPTER I. A STRANGE ADVENTURE. It was a beautiful winter night. The sky was brilliant with millions of beautiful stars that glowed and scintillated as if conscious that their light had never before penetrated an atmosphere so rarefied and pure. The earth was covered with a glaring coat of ice above newly fallen snow. Trees and shrubs bent low and gracefully beneath the weight of icy jewels which adorned every twig and branch. Every roof and spire, chimney and turret, gleamed like frosted silver beneath the star-lit heavens, while the overhanging eaves below were fringed with myriads of glistening points that seemed like pendulous diamonds, catching and refracting every ray of light from the glittering vault above and the gas-lit streets beneath. But it was a night, too, of intense cold. Never within the remembrance of its oldest inhabitant had the mercury fallen so low in the city of Boston, as on this nineteenth of January, 185-. So severe was the weather that nearly every street was deserted at an early hour of the evening; scarcely a pedestrian was to be seen at nine o’clock, and the brilliantly lighted thoroughfares had a lonely and desolate appearance without their accustomed flow of life and humanity. The luckless policemen, who alone paraded the slippery sidewalks on their round of duty, would now and then slink into sheltered nooks and door-ways for a brief respite from the stinging, frosty air, where they would vainly strive to excite a better circulation by the active swinging of arms and the vigorous stamping of feet. Even the horse-cars and omnibuses were scantily patronized, while the poor drivers, muffled to their eyebrows in fur coats and comforters, seemed like dark, grim specters, devoid of life and motion, save for the breath that issued from their mouths and nostrils, and, congealing, formed in frozen globules among their beards. At ten o’clock on this bitter night, Thomas Turner, M. D., was arranging his office preparatory to retiring, and feeling profoundly thankful that he had no patients who demanded his attention, and believing, too, that no one would venture forth to call him, when, to his annoyance and dismay, his bell suddenly rang a clanging and imperative peal. With a shiver of dread at the thought of having to leave the warmth and comfort of his home, to face the fearful cold, yet with a premonition that the summons would result in something out of the ordinary course of events, he laid down the case of instruments that he had been carefully arranging, and went to answer the call. He found a lad of perhaps fifteen years standing outside the door. Without a word he thrust a card into the physician’s hand.