Moods of the night pass with their tragic glooms, and the first lines of sorrow fade into dull distaste and distant apprehension. Husband and wife met day by day, and slowly the black cloud between them became imperceptibly mist: the man dared raise his eyes to that pitiable face, and the silent wife began to speak. Doctors had come and applied their poultices against panic,--the vast circle of probabilities, the excellences of regimen. Then the engineer, in the fulfilment of his business engagements, had gone away for six weeks, which the mother and child had spent at the seacoast for a change of air. Early in September they were living once more in the pleasant country house outside the great city, and husband and wife were talking almost confidently of what they should do in this matter and that, speaking with more and more certainty as the days slipped past. Something grave in the woman’s voice, a touch of doubt in the glance between them--those signs alone remained, and the memory. Another trip to the mines was to be made; the date of departure Simmons put off, in order that he might take his wife to the large dance at the Bellflowers’. On this day he returned from the city by an early afternoon train. When the coachman drew up before the house, no one could be seen about the place. Simmons called out heartily: “I say, where are you? Is any one about? Evelyn!” Windows and doors were open; the summer wind blew through the house. There was a vacancy about it all which impressed the man. “There was somethin’ or other goin’ on when I hitched up,” the coachman ventured to remark. “There were a lot of hollerin’ and screamin’, sir; somethin’ up with the children.” He had the air of being able to tell more if necessary. Mr. Simmons jumped to the ground and entered the house. A servant, who finally appeared in answer to his repeated calls, told him that she had seen Mrs. Simmons crossing the meadow below the lawn, in the direction of the little river at the bottom of the grounds. She had little Oscar with her, so said the maid, and she seemed to be hurrying. He hastened to the little boat-house on the river. Hot summer afternoons it was a common thing for his wife to row upon the river, yet every moment he quickened his steps until he was on the run. From the meadow wall he could see his boat tied to a stake in the stream, riding tranquilly. Evelyn was not on the river. He followed the foot-path, hesitatingly, beside the sluggish stream, calling in a voice which he tried to make quite natural: “Evelyn! Oscar! Evelyn--where are you?” There was a yard or two of sandy beach beside the boat-house, and there he found them. His wife was kneeling down on the sand, her face to the river, engaged in hurriedly undressing the child. She had him almost stripped of his clothes, and she was talking to him, while he listened with the attention, the thoughtfulness, of a man. Suddenly spying his father, he laughed and broke from his mother’s arms.