Several months elapsed. Mr. Green had returned home, well satisfied with his day's business. In his pocket was the afternoon paper, which, after the younger children were in bed, and the older ones out of his way, he sat down to read. His eyes turned to the foreign intelligence, and almost the first sentence he read was the intelligence of his son's death. The paper dropped from his hands, while he uttered an expression of surprise and grief that caused the cheeks of his wife, who was in the room, to turn deadly pale. She had not power to ask the cause of her husband's sudden exclamation; but her heart, that ever yearned toward her absent boy, instinctively divined the truth. "John is dead!" said Mr. Green, at length, speaking in a tremulous tone of voice. There was from the mother no wild burst of anguish. The boy had been dying to her daily for years, and she had suffered for him worse than the pangs of death. Burying her face in her hands, she wept silently, yet hopelessly. "If we were only blameless of the poor child's death!" said Mrs. Green, lifting her tearful eyes, after the lapse of nearly ten minutes, and speaking in a sad, self-rebuking tone of voice. When those with whom we are in close relationship die, how quickly is that page in memory's book turned on which lies the record of unkindness or neglect! Already had this page been turned for Mr. Green, and conscience was sweeping therefrom the dust that well-nigh obscured the handwriting. He inwardly trembled as he read the condemning sentences that charged him with his son's ruin. "If we were only blameless of the poor child's death!" How these words of the grieving mother smote upon his heart. He did not respond to them. How could he do so at that moment? "Where is Edward?" he inquired, at length. "I don't know," sobbed the mother. "He is out somewhere almost every evening. Oh! I wish you would look to him a little more closely. He is past my control." "I must do so," returned Mr. Green, speaking from a strong conviction of the necessity of doing as his wife suggested; "if I only had a little more time----" {96} He checked himself. It was the old excuse--the rock upon which all his best hopes for his first-born had been fearfully wrecked. His lips closed, his head was bowed, and, in the bitterness of unavailing sorrow, he mused on the past, while every moment the conviction of wrong toward his child, now irreparable, grew stronger and stronger.