the feeble wail of a new-born babe.


III.


STORM.


The doctor hurried ahead in the darkness. Rand, who had stopped
paralyzed at the ominous sound, started forward again mechanically; but
as the cry arose again more distinctly, and the full significance of
the doctor's words came to him, he faltered, stopped, and, with cheeks
burning with shame and helpless indignation, sank upon a stone beside
the shaft, and, burying his face in his hands, fairly gave way to a
burst of boyish tears. Yet even then the recollection that he had not
cried since, years ago, his mother's dying hands had joined his and
Ruth's childish fingers together, stung him fiercely, and dried his
tears in angry heat upon his cheeks.

How long he sat there, he remembered not; what he thought, he recalled
not. But the wildest and most extravagant plans and resolves availed him
nothing in the face of this forever desecrated home, and this shameful
culmination of his ambitious life on the mountain. Once he thought of
flight; but the reflection that he would still abandon his brother to
shame, perhaps a self-contented shame, checked him hopelessly. Could he
avert the future? He MUST; but how? Yet he could only sit and stare into
the darkness in dumb abstraction.

Sitting there, his eyes fell upon a peculiar object in a crevice of