some unpalatable raw eggs found among the hay; and this fact of hunger gave a mighty grip to the poignancy of "Because." He had had naught to do all the long rainy day but to lie in the hay and look out through the crevices of the logs at the queer acorn-like roof of his mother's house, that had welcomed so many, and had no place now for him or for her. He watched with all the grief of an exile the children coming and going, and the gaunt Mrs. Timson wielding an unbridled authority, making the most of her usurpations; he heard, with the indignant objection that naturally appertains to the heir to the throne, her raucous raised voice in objurgation or command. Again and again these sounds came from the opaque blankness of the mist; for often the clouds obscured the little house altogether, and crowded through the crevices of the barn, and shifted back and forth. For the reason of the continuous fog he had delayed to inform the officer of the law and deliver Espey to him. Doubtless, in the idleness of his solitary day in the mine, Espey would be alert and hear an approach, and might escape through some aperture of the cavern other than the main entrance; the thick mists would then conceal him indubitably, and further his flight without the slightest scruple as to responsibility as accessory after the fact. Larrabee was waiting for the darkness that he might take Espey the more certainly, while his vigilance was relaxed in working at the forlorn enterprise of old Haight and his lieutenant "Tawm" in the mine. But in waiting Larrabee had fallen asleep, and the iteration of the steady rainfall was somnolent in its effects, and the hours drowsed by. He knew that it was past midnight before he noted the slant of a late-risen moon, golden, lustrous, dreamlike, softly shining through the crevices of the logs in one corner of the ramshackle old place. The sky was clearing, then. He rose hastily to his feet, and leaned out of the window. Clear! It was of a deeply limpid and definite blue, with white and gray clouds, moon-illumined, drawing back swiftly from vast expanses of this lucid ether all a-sparkle with the whiteness of the stars. With the dank earth so dark below, and the dully glamourous light of the moon in her last quarter, it seemed to him that he had never seen the stars so splendidly white. The next moment a sudden pang of suspense, of fear, that was like a bodily throe had wrested away his breath. He hardly realized that he had moved; he only knew that he had sprung down the rotting rungs of the old ladder and through the barn below, because he was standing outside the door upon the ground, gazing up, bareheaded, wild-eyed, in a frenzy of doubt, of anxiety, of a sort of unreasoning terror, at the skies. For the star--his star--was gone! It had vanished! Again and again, with the strong pulse of hope, he swept the heavens with eager search. Afterward he thought he remembered a dull leaden-hued minute object in the place of that splendid silver