“Harry,” she cried, “Harry! oh where is my boy?” There was not a trace of him about; not even an impromptu couch, like Joan’s, made up of benches and washing tubs. The mother flitted about into all the offices, while Joan roused herself with many yawns, rubbing her stiff neck and knotting up her straggling locks, and gathering her shawl round her shoulders. “Oh that copper,” Joan was saying, “it’s been the saving of my life.” “But where is my boy? Oh! Joan, what have you done with him? Where is my boy?” “I have not got him in my pocket,” Joan said, with a sleepy smile. Then as she roused herself quite up, “To be sure, mother, the lad’s not a fool though we give him the credit of it. He’s gone back to his blessed ‘Red Lion,’ and is safe in his bed, as I would like to be. And if I had let him alone and not poked in where I wasn’t wanted, there’s where he would have been from the first. You see that’s just your way. I have a little bit of it in me, if not much; and, instead of letting him be, I must meddle. But he’s safe in his bed at the ‘Red Lion;’ and you’d better go back to yours, and let me go to mine, and make the best of a bad night.” “I cannot think he has gone to the ‘Red Lion,’” said Mrs. Joscelyn, standing in her white nightdress, with her glaring candle, against the great darkness of the night in the doorway, and investigating the gloom by that poor assistance with her anxious eyes. “Then where else would he go to?” Joan said. CHAPTER VI. A NIGHT WALK. The moon had set when Harry Joscelyn left the White House; and the night was very dark, as it is so often after the setting of the moon. The sky was cloudy, and scarcely a star was visible. The wind blew cold in his face when he got beyond the shelter of the walls. He looked up at the house as he passed it with a sensation of rage and contempt which it is only possible to reach when the object we thus hate and despise is one that ought to be beloved. He lifted a handful of gravel and threw it violently at his mother’s window. There was no softening of feeling, no wish to say a farewell, even if an angry one in this. It was done in boyish rage, with a simple desire to strike. He was glad to think the stones struck sharply, and might, perhaps, have broken a pane and fallen like shot upon the floor. This was what he would have wished. When he had discharged that parting volley, he pulled down his hat over his ears, and put up his coat-collar. It was all he could do against the wind, which blew through and through him. Not even an overcoat! They were determined that he should have nothing; that he should be expelled without even the poorest covering; that he should be exposed to everything dangerous, everything disagreeable. To be sure, that was what they wanted! Revenge filled the young fellow’s heart as he went along in the dark, shivering at first, till his rapid progress set his blood in motion. Not only without a home, without a roof to shelter him, or a bed