At length the door opposite opened, and Julia appeared, her face completely hidden behind a veil.  Johanna helped her into the low carriage, as if she had been an invalid, and paid her those minute trivial attentions which one woman showers upon another when she is in great grief.  Then they drove off, and were soon out of my sight.

By this time our dinner-hour was near, and I knew my mother would be looking out for us both.  I was thankful to find at the table a visitor, who had dropped in unexpectedly:  one of my father’s patients—­a widow, with a high color, a loud voice, and boisterous spirits, who kept up a rattle of conversation with Dr. Dobree.  My mother glanced anxiously at me very often, but she could say little.

“Where is Julia?” she had inquired, as we sat down to dinner without her.

“Julia?” I said, quite absently; “oh! she is gone to the Vale, with Johanna Carey.”

“Will she come back to-night?” asked my mother.

“Not to-night,” I said, aloud; but to myself I added, “nor for many nights to come; never, most probably, while I am under this roof.  We have been building our house upon the sand, and the floods have come, and the winds have blown, and the house has fallen; but my mother knows nothing of the catastrophe yet.”

If it were possible to keep her ignorant of it!  But that could not be.  She read trouble in my face, as clearly as one sees a thunder-cloud in the sky, and she could not rest till she had fathomed it.  After she and our guest had left us, my father lingered only a few minutes.  He was not a man that cared for drinking much wine, with no companion but me, and he soon pushed the decanters from him.

“You are as dull as a beetle to-night, Martin,” he said.  “I think I will go and see how your mother and Mrs. Murray get along together.”

He went his way, and I went mine—­up into my own room, where I should be alone to think over things.  It was a pleasant room, and had been mine from my boyhood.  There were some ugly old pictures still hanging against the walls, which I could not find in my heart to take down.  The model of a ship I had carved with my penknife, the sails of which had been made by Julia, occupied the top shelf over my books.  The first pistol I had ever possessed lay on the same shelf.  It was my own den, my nest, my sanctuary, my home within the home.  I could not think of myself being quite at home anywhere else.

Of late I had been awakened in the night two or three times, and found my mother standing at my bedside, with her thin, transparent fingers shading the light from my eyes.  When I remonstrated with her she had kissed me, smoothed the clothes about me, and promised meekly to go back to bed.  Did she visit me every night? and would there come a time when she could not visit me?

CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH.

BROKEN OFF.