"Not Alicia!" my voice broke out from the turmoil of my thoughts like the voice in a dream breaking the barriers of sleep. "Eh?" said Pendleton faintly. "Did you call, Uncle Ranny?" Alicia turned and asked in a clear, steady voice. "Yes, Alicia," I struggled for control. "Here is Mr. Pendleton—come to see the children." I meant to say "his children," but I could not. The whole sickly-colored evening seemed to shudder at my words. The children seemed like wraiths under the tree to shudder away from the intruding material world. In a moment—what a tragic moment—Pendleton was bending toward them, peering, peering into their white, frightened faces. Then his gaze settled on Alicia and hung there for a space. "This must be Randolph," he finally turned to the eldest boy, "grown—grown up—isn’t it?" and his arms stirred forward. "Yes, sir," the boy answered hoarsely and put out his hand. "And this—can this be baby Laura?" Laura hung her head then raised it bravely and with shy resolution held out her hand. Pendleton took it and kissed her clumsily on the cheek. Jimmie, hanging back, clung to Alicia’s skirt and watched the proceedings with troubled stealth from behind her. "And this is Jimmie," I said, taking the child by the shoulder—"the youngest of them." As Pendleton was stooping toward him, Jimmie uttered a wild scream of heartbreaking terror, wrenched himself from my hold and fled like some little wounded animal toward the house. Pendleton gave a short, mirthless laugh. My throat was parched, my heart Was thumping like a rabbit’s, but how I loved Jimmie at that moment! "He is only a baby," put in Alicia softly. Again Pendleton looked at her—obliquely. "And this is—" he murmured. "Alicia Palmer," I supplied hastily, "who has been looking after them." "Ah, Alicia—a little deputy mother—" and he held out his hand with shamefaced suavity. The scene was over—the incredible episode—commonplace enough as I write it down. But I lived a dozen melodramas in that eternity that a clock would tick off in three or four minutes of time. *CHAPTER XV* Walking about as I do under sentence, I am like a man of my acquaintance, a stodgy, a terrible Philistine, who cherished for years a fancy that he could write Gilbert and Sullivan operas. In all his life he had probably never rhymed anything more subtle than love, above and dove. Since any fool, in his opinion, could supply the music, he aspired only to the Gilbertian librettos. Incessantly and hopelessly out of key he went about humming the Sullivan tunes to the lyrics he alleged to have in his mind. Similarly, I go about with a sense of mendacious buoyancy,—like a shipwrecked passenger bobbing helplessly in a troubled sea, but still alive; a flickering glimmer of hope, like a desperate man facing a tiger, but still undevoured. Brazenly I still expect happiness to emerge, somehow, out of hopelessness.