The climax came when James brought home a wife,—a clerk like himself in the Treasury Department. This was the straw too many and the bridal was soon followed by a funeral, the old man saying he was glad to go where the Percys could not be disgraced. Had he lived a few months longer he would have seen his son’s wife an heiress in a small way. A maiden aunt, for whom she was named and who all her life had hoarded her money earned in the cotton mills of Lowell, died and left her niece ten thousand dollars. This was a fortune to the young couple, who left their cramped quarters for a larger house, where, with the father-in-law gone and a sturdy baby boy in the cradle, they were perfectly happy for a time. Then, with scarcely an hour’s warning, the wife was taken away, stricken with cholera, and James was alone with Sally and his boy, the notorious John, or Jack, the terror of Oak City and of every neighborhood he frequented. Jack was bright and handsome, but proud and rebellious, and learned very soon that the woman his father married within two years of his wife’s death was not his own mother. She was pretty and indolent and easy-going, and could no more cope with her step-son’s will than she could stem Niagara. She disliked him and he disliked her for no reason except that she was his stepmother, and when Clarice was born the breach widened between them, although the boy showed affection for his little sister. When she was five years old and Jack was ten their father died, leaving to his widow the house in which they lived and a few thousand dollars, besides the small fortune she had brought him as the result of her father’s speculations. To Jack was left his mother’s ten thousand dollars intact. Had Jack chosen he could have won his mother then when her heart was sore and aching for some one to comfort her, if it were only a boy. But he didn’t choose; he was wayward and headstrong, and always an anxiety and trouble to her. With many good qualities, Mrs. Percy was a weak woman and talked a great deal of her husband’s family and the old Virginia homestead and the ancestral hall in England. On this point she was a little shaky in her own mind, as the ancestral hall was only a tradition; but it was a fine thing to talk about and no one could dispute it. The Virginia homestead stood not many miles from what is known as Cabin John. It had been partly repaired by her husband, and some of the rooms made habitable for the time his family spent there. Beechwood it was called, and to those who never saw it Mrs. Percy talked of it as her country house, to which she went every summer for quiet and rest from the fatigue of society, and because it was so lovely. In reality she went there to economize, and not because she cared for the great bare rooms, the leaky roof and decaying timbers, which let one end of the broad piazza drop half a foot lower than the other. Economy was a necessity if she made any show in Washington, where she struggled hard