part I'm coming to now is burnt in. There has never been a moment since

it happened that I couldn't have told it every word, and so it will be till God takes me home. Much of what I have told you I had partly forgotten, until I began to think it over, but what is to come I have never been able to leave off thinking of all my life."

"Oh, that sounds dreadful!" cried Hugh, rather frightened.

"It 'is' so. Maybe if I had made no secret of it all, but lived my life in the light of day—Your mother thinks so. But the light is coming. It will come with the thaw."

The boys stole off to bed, Hugh undressing in dead silence. When he had said his prayers, he looked at the other two boys and said—

"Do you know, I almost wish Uncle Jasper 'would' forget the rest of the story? I don't like it—not this part of it. I don't feel as if things will be the same again, after we've heard it."

"Oh, nonsense! I'm longing to know what he really did," cried Harry; "and I'm very sure it was nothing so dreadful, after all."

"Then I don't agree with you!" said Hugh.

But, as he was seldom known to agree with any one, this remark failed to impress his brothers as much as it ought to have done.