She closed the book abruptly at a sound of baby laughter from the nursery, and gliding into the room stood looking at Norah's busy movements. She was giving Master Paul his nightly bath on the rug in front of the fire. Up to his white and dimpled shoulders, in the marble bath of perfumed water, the little fellow was laughing and enjoying the fun to his heart's content. It won the child-like young mother to laughter too. She seated herself on a low ottoman near him, and watched the dear little baby, with its graceful, exquisite limbs flashing through the water, a rosy, perfect little Cupid, and something like content warmed her chilled and perturbed spirit. "I can never be utterly desolate while I have him," she murmured, running her taper, jeweled fingers through the clustering rings of his dark hair. Norah, looking across at her mistress, asked, timidly, if she were quite resolved on going to Washington next week. Mrs. Winans' soft eyes fixed themselves on the bright anthracite fire in the grate, as if an answer to the question might be evoked from its mystic hearth. Her baby seized the opportunity thus afforded to catch the nearest end of one of her floating ringlets, and dip it in the bath with mischievous fingers. She caught it from his fingers with a fitful smile, and began wringing the water from the golden tendrils, and asking absently: "What was it you asked me, Norah?" "I asked if you really intended visiting Washington next week," explained Norah, clearly and intelligibly. She was an educated Irishwoman, and did not affect the brogue of her countrymen. "Yes, I certainly do so intend," decisively this time, and leaning a little forward, twisting the damp curl into a hundred glittering little spirals, she went on: "for a few days only though, as I believe I told you this morning." "You will not take much baggage, then, I suppose?" "No," smiling at the baby's antics in the water, and dodging the drops he mischievously splashed in her direction, "only a small trunk with necessary changes for baby and myself. I certainly shall not stay more than three days at the most." _Shall not?_ On the mystic page of our irrevocable destiny our resolves are sometimes translated crosswise, and _will_ sometimes becomes _will not_, and _shall not_ oft becomes _shall_! We, who cannot see a moment beyond the present hour, undertake in the face of God to say what we shall or shall not do in the unknown future! But poor human hearts, "Feeble and finite, oh! what can we know!" CHAPTER X. AT THE CAPITOL. "Alone she sat--alone! that worn-out word, So idly spoken and so coldly heard; Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known, Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word--alone!" --THE NEW TIMON. "How changed since last her speaking eye Glanced gladness round the glittering room; Where high-born men were proud to wait, And beauty watched to imitate."