Often the soldier would bend and listen acutely for any least murmur of voices or rustle of secret footstep whispering into the blank deadliness of the pit beneath him. He heard nothing; was conscious of no sound he could set apart from the distant noises of the house as suspicious and unaccountable. Yet the voices were there and the footsteps; but muffled so completely by the thick stone as to be inaudible to the solitary man above. Presently he found something irresistibly attractive in the swaying flame of the candle on the wall. It was an aspen leaf blown by the wind. A certain fever in his blood seemed to temper the cutting draught to the caress of a summer zephyr. He was on a breezy common he had known in childhood, eagerly hunting over a familiar poplar tree for the moth (he remembered all at once, it went by the name of the “Sycamore”) that lay cunningly hid by day in the furrows of the bark, from which in colour it might scarcely be distinguished. He put out his hand with a smile, staggered on the brink of the pit, recovered himself and resumed his tramp with a curse at his own folly. But by and by the flame fixed his attention once more. Tibbie! Who was she, and why should he associate her with the jumping light? He remembered all at once. It was the queer name of a little Scotch girl he had worshipped as a boy. She had had hair golden as barley straw, and he had begged a curl and had put it in his Bible, where it was always connected in his mind with the tongues of flame. Good God! how long ago was that? And would Tibbie give him a curl now, if she knew? Quite suddenly his eyes were thick with tears. He pressed his hand to them fiercely, and went up and down again--up and down. What strange caprice of memory was renewing for him these shining ghosts of his past? The new emotion, with a touch of ancient sorrow in it, sang in his brain like restful music. Standing, he leaned against the wall, shut his eyes--and immediately, with a throb and swerve of ecstasy, he was asleep. * * * * * * * * * * *