On the night referred to, the lonely general, then creeping up the vale of years, was seated in the library, lingering over his last glass of grog, and gazing, as we last left him, into the glowing embers; his thoughts wandered away from present things to the past in spite of himself. He reviewed the things of old--forgotten sayings and doings in camp and quarters, in the field and the Indian jungle; the faces and the voices of the distant and the dead came back to him, and among them, more powerfully than usual, the face and voice of his lost son, Piers. There was no sound in the room but the steady and monotonous ticking of a great antique clock on the black marble mantel-piece, and the snoring of a Highland stag-hound stretched upon a deerskin before the fire, unless we add that the night wind moaned shudderingly through a coppice of red-stemmed Scottish firs, and the beech-trees swayed drearily in the passing blast. A sudden sense of some one being near him--something intangible, too--came over him; he seemed to hear a sigh, and brave though he was, his heart felt as if dying within him, and the hair of his head stood up, or a prickly sensation pervaded all his scalp. Beside his chair a kind of shadow seemed to form itself, and become, with each pulsation of his pulses, more distinct in outline, till the face and form of his son were before him--the former wasted and pallid, his eyes full of sorrow and reproach. His hands seemed unusually white, wan, and the articulations of the fingers were painfully distinct, as those of one who had been wasted by fever, toil, and want. A thousand maddening and terrifying thoughts seemed to whirl through the general's brain. He strove to start from his chair, but remained in it as if spellbound; he strove to cry aloud, but his voice failed him, or the faint sound he did utter seemed unnatural, and filled him with greater fear. For a moment or two the upbraiding spirit, if spirit it was, or a creation of his own fevered fancy, stood before him, and then slowly melted away. Sir Piers started to his feet. 'I have been dreaming,' he said, with a kind of gasping sigh. 'A plague on such dreams and fancies!' But something seemed to tell him it was _not_ a dream, and not a fancy, and he remembered that in the pale and wasted hands of the figure were a sheaf of small brushes such as artists use, and a mahl-stick. Had Piers in his dire necessity betaken himself to art to gain a livelihood? He sat for some time waiting and watching, in a state of awe, terror, and intense anxiety, for the appearance to return, but it came no more; but from that moment an assurance stole into his heart that his son must be dead--that he perhaps died at that particular moment: and then he began to think, and think, and think again, how hard and pitiless he had been; and his handsome face grew older and more lined, and wrinkles seemed to come where none were formed as yet. He might have said with Balder: