He was alone--at least alone at the hotel; and Dr. Pomeroy, if he had entertained any actual belief in his suggested elopement between the lawyer and his "ward," might easily have satisfied himself, had he followed him to the commercial metropolis, that no such elopement had taken place or that the abductor had hidden his paramour carefully away and managed to keep continually out of her presence. Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time; and the writer, without any wish or will to do so, yields to the necessity, very much as the proud man of the world yields to the pressure when events which he has assumed to direct grow too mighty for his hand and bear him away in their rush and tumult,--or as a father--to use a yet stronger and more painful image--submits with a groan and a prayer when the child of his dear love shuts the heart against him and breaks away from that tender control which it has been alike his duty and his pleasure to supply. Some of our mental children, especially when they are so real that time, place and circumstance cannot be made for them at will, are sadly unmanageable; and this instance furnishes an illustration which will be better understood at a later period. Acts may yet be recorded, while yet acts remain to record; but the heart closes, motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events without connection and actions without explanation. Taking up his quarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Wednesday, this man, on Friday, the third of July, while the city was in agonized anxiety over the conflicting accounts of Meade's first battle of the day before, and while the black frames for the Fourth of July fireworks were being erected in front of the City Hall in the Park, with some uncertainty in the minds of the workmen whether they would not be used for a pyrotechnic display over the death-throe of the nation,--this man, Carlton Brand, took one of the omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line passing the door of his hotel, alighted at the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway, walked down to the Bowling Green and entered the office of the Cunard Steamships fronting that faded relic of the Colonial splendors of New York. When he emerged from the office, fifteen minutes later, the cash-box of the British and North American Royal Mail Steamship Company was the richer by many broad pieces of American gold, and Carlton Brand bore, folded away in his wallet, one of those costly little pearl-white wings on which the birds of passage bear themselves over the Atlantic. It was evident that he was about to desert his country--that country for which he had before refused to fight,--to desert it at the very moment when its fate before God and the world seemed to hang trembling in the balance.