He was still in the bare room, but a fire burnt in the grate. A table and two chairs furnished the apartment, and made apparent the frightful poverty. The dreamer was no longer a man, but a child playing with a toy horse by the fire. Near the table sat a woman sewing. Then a man entered--the man whose face he had seen in the photograph. A quarrel ensued between him and the woman; the child--the dreamer himself--became suddenly possessed of a blind rage against the man. Then all faded in darkness. He was in bed still a child--again in darkness. Then once more he was in the room. The window was open; near it lay the dead body of the man, the blood welling from his heart. At the door stood the woman, a knife in her hand, a look of terror on her face. Then came rain, and mist, and cold, and the dreamer felt that he was falling into a gulf of darkness, never again to emerge into the light of day. But the woman's face, with blue eyes looking from under a crown of fair hair, still shone like a star in the gloom. It smiled on the dreamer, then it vanished as he awoke with a cry. Neil Webster sprang to his feet with the perspiration beading his forehead and shaking in every limb. The dream had been so vivid! Was it but a dream? Here was the room, here the open window, and here, where he had seen the dead body of the man, black stains of blood marked the floor. He started back with a cry as he saw it all, and flung himself out into the snow which still kept falling in thick flakes. Away from that house he ran, feeling that he had recovered the memory of his childhood. His father had been murdered. By whom? That was the question he asked himself as he sped onwards through the snow. "Oh Heavens!" he kept murmuring. "What does it all mean? Why was I sent to that house to learn this terrible truth? Why? Why?" But the snow fell ever more thickly, and the young man fled along the road. In the same way had his mother fled with him in her arms, fled through the mists to escape the horror of the Turnpike House. CHAPTER VI. MR. CASS SPEAKS. Jennie Brawn sat in her bedroom with an agonised took on her face, with inky fingers and tumbled hair. Miss Brawn was courting the Muse. As yet she had had but ill success, for the Muse was not in a kindly mood. "If, dear, thou should'st unhappy be, Remember me, Remember me!" murmured the poetess. "I think that will do for a refrain. But how am I to begin? Ah!" with a sudden inspiration. "Spring in the first verse, summer and roses in the second, then winter and dying for an effective finish." And she began to thresh out the first lines. "The spring is flowering all the world----" "Humph!" she broke off. "That sounds as though spring were a baker! I must try again." But before she could think of an alternative line the door burst open and Ruth rushed in violently, all on fire with excitement. "Jennie! Jennie! she cried, plumping down on the bed. I've had a proposal!"