Eloise told him all she thought necessary to tell him, while his face grew purple with anger, and his clenched fists beat the air as if attacking an imaginary Homer Smith.

“It’s a comfort to know, if there is a God—­and I know there is—­he is getting his deserts,” he said.  Then, as his mood changed, he continued, “And you are the little normal I didn’t want, and you board with Mrs. Biggs?”

“Yes,” Eloise replied.  “I am the normal you did not want, and I board with Mrs. Biggs, where I heard a great deal of Mrs. Amy, as they call her.  I must have a slow, stupid mind, or I should have suspected who she was.  I never heard the name Harris connected with her.  If I had I should have known.  It is so clear to me now.”

The Colonel looked at her a moment, and then said, “If you are Amy’s daughter you are a Harris, and they are queer, with slow minds,—­and now go.  I am infernally tired, and cannot keep up much longer.”

He moved his hand toward her, and Eloise took it and pressed it to her lips.

“D-don’t,” the Colonel said, but held fast to the soft, warm hand clasping his.  “If one’s life could roll back,” he added, more to himself than to Eloise, as his head dropped wearily upon his breast, and he whispered, “I am sorry for a great deal.  God knows I am sorry.  Call Peter.”

The old servant came and got him to bed, and sat by him most of the night.  Toward morning, finding that he was sleeping quietly, he, too, lay down and slept until the early sun was shining into the room.  Waking with a start, he hurried to his master’s side, to find him with wide-open eyes full of terror as he tried to ask what had happened to him.  All power to move except his head was gone, and when he tried to talk his lips gave only inarticulate sounds which no one could understand.

“Paralysis,” the doctor said when summoned.  “I have expected it a long time,” he continued, and would give no hope to Amy and Eloise, who hastened to the sick-room.

The moment they came in the Colonel’s eyes brightened, and when Amy stooped and kissed him he tried to kiss her back.  Then he fixed his eyes on Eloise with a questioning glance, which made her say to him, “Do you know me?”

He struggled hard for a moment, and then replied, “Yesh, ’Lisha Ann!  Stay!” and those were the only really intelligible words he ever spoke.

They telegraphed to Worcester for Howard, and learning that he was in Boston, telegraphed there, and found him at the Vendome.  “Come at once.  Your uncle is dying,” the telegram said, and Howard read it with a sensation for which he hated himself, and which he could not entirely shake off.  He tried to believe he did not want his uncle to die, but if he did die, what might it not do for him, the only direct heir, if Amy were not a lawful daughter?  And he did not believe she was.  She had not been adopted, and he had never heard of a will, and before he was aware of it a feeling that he was master of