Then next morning his gout was so bad that he was wheeled into the dining-room, where he was fast growing angry at the delay of breakfast, and beginning to swear again when Peter, who knew how to manage him, went for Amy.  Nothing quieted the Colonel like a sight of Amy, with her sweet face and gentle ways.

“Please come.  It’s beginning to sizzle,” Peter frequently said to her when a storm was brewing, and Amy always went, and was like oil on the troubled waters.

“What is it?” she now asked, and the Colonel replied, “What is it!  I should say, what is it!  There’s the very old Harry to pay.  Brutus has a big hole in his breast, the carriage is smashed, silk cushions all stained with a girl’s blue gown, and that girl the school-teacher I didn’t want; and she’s broken her leg or something when they tipped over, and Howard and his friend carried her to Widow Biggs’s, and the Lord knows what didn’t happen!”

Amy had a way of seeming to listen very attentively when the Colonel talked to her, and always smiled her appreciation and approbation of what he said.  Just how much she really heard or understood was doubtful.  Her mind seemed to run in two channels,—­one the present, the other the past,—­and both were blurred and indistinct,—­especially the past.  She understood about the young girl, however, and at once expressed her sympathy, and said, “We must do something for her.”

To do something for any one in sickness or trouble was her first thought, and many a home had been made glad because of her since she came to Crompton.

“Certainly; do what you like, only don’t bring her here,” the Colonel replied, his voice and manner softening, as they always did with Amy.

She was a very handsome woman and looked younger than her years.  The storm which had swept over her had not impaired her physical beauty, but had touched her mentally in a way very puzzling to those about her, and rather annoying to the Colonel, who was trying to make amends for the harshness which had driven her from his home.  Sometimes her quiet, passive manner irritated him, and he felt that he would gladly welcome the old imperiousness with which she had defied him.  But it was gone.  Something had broken her on the wheel, killing her spirit completely, or smothering it and leaving her a timid, silent woman, who sat for hours with a sad, far-off expression, as if looking into the past and trying to gather up the tangled threads which had in a measure obscured her intellect.

“The Harrises are queer,” kept sounding in the Colonel’s ears, with a thought that the taint in the Harris blood was working in Amy’s veins, intensified by some great shock, or series of shocks.

Once, after he brought her home, he questioned her of her life as a singer, and of the baby, which she occasionally mentioned, but he never repeated the experiment.  There was a fit of nervous trembling,—­a look of terror in her eyes, and a drawn expression on her face, and for a moment she was like the girl Eudora when roused.  Then, putting her hand before her eyes as if to shut out something hateful to her, she said, “Oh, don’t ask me to bring up a past I can’t remember without such a pain in my head and everywhere, as if I were choking.  It was very dreadful,—­with him,—­not with Adolf,—­he was so kind.”