sweets of the stolen hours at the domestic fireside, with the dear faces that he loved, the dulcet voices for which he yearned,--he was to skulk here, undreamed of, like some unhappy ghost haunting a lonely place, fortunate indeed if he might chance to be able to make off elusively after the fashion of the spectral gentry, without becoming a ghost in serious earnest by the event of capture, or catching the pistol ball of the Yankee officer. So much he had risked for this visit--life and limb!--and to be relegated to the surplusage of the garret, the loneliness, the desolate moon, the deserted dust of the unfrequented place! He was to approach none of them--none of the hearthstone group! There was to be no joyous greeting, no stealthy laughter, no interchange of loving words, and clasps, and kisses. He was still young; his eyes filled, his throat closed. But that shadowy glimpse of his dear father--he had had that boon! "I'll remember it, if I bite the dust in the next skirmish. And the question is to get away--for the next skirmish!" Once more he fell to studying mechanically the grouping of the archaic, disordered furniture; the shifting of the shadows amongst it as a cloud sped by with the wind; the spare boughs of a bare aspen tree etched on the floor by the moon, shining down through the high windows; and that melancholy orb itself, suggestive of a futile vanished past, a time forgotten, and spent illusions, the familiar of loneliness, and the deep empty hours of the midnight--itself a spectre of a dead planet, haunting its wonted pathway of the skies. When its light ceased to fill his lustrous, contemplative eyes he did not know, but as the moon passed on to the west, his melancholy gaze had ceased to follow. CHAPTER VI Joy came in the morning when the raven alighted. The "two-faced Janus" was wreathed in smiles, bent double with chuckles, and tears of delight sparkled in his eyes.