“Jedge Basil, the Dutch have hunted you down.  He’s here—­the Yankee creditor.”

Joyce Basil held up her hand in imploration, but Reybold did not heed the woman’s remark.  He felt a weight rising from his heart, and the blindness of many months lifted from his eyes.  The dying mortal upon the bed, over whose face the blue billow of death was rolling rapidly, and whose eyes sought in his daughter’s the promise of mercy from on high, was the mysterious parent who had never arrived—­the Judge from Fauquier.  In that old man’s long waxed mustache, crimped hair, and threadbare finery the Congressman recognized old Beau, the outcast gamester and mendicant, and the father of Joyce and Uriel Basil.

“Colonel Reybold,” faltered that old wreck of manly beauty and of promise long departed, “old Beau’s passing in his checks.  The chant coves will be telling to-morrow what they know of his life in the papers, but I’ve dropped a cold deck on ’em these twenty years.  Not one knows old Beau, the Bloke, to be Tom Basil, cadet at West Point in the last generation.  I’ve kept nothing of my own but my children’s good names.  My little boy never knew me to be his father.  I tried to keep the secret from my daughter, but her affection broke down my disguises.  Thank God! the old rounder’s deal has run out at last.  For his wife he’ll flash her diles no more, nor be taken on the vag.”

“Basil,” said Reybold, “what trust do you leave to me in your family?”

Mrs. Basil strove to interpose, but the dying man raised his voice: 

“Tryphonee can go home to Fauquier.  She was always welcome there—­ without me.  I was disinherited.  But here, Colonel!  My last drop of blood is in the girl.  She loves you.”

A rattle arose in the sinner’s throat.  He made an effort, and transferred his daughter’s hand to the Congressman’s.  Not taking it away, she knelt with her future husband at the bedside and raised her voice: 

“Lord, when Thou comest into Thy kingdom, remember him!”

IN EACH OTHER’S SHOES
-----------------------
BY GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP

George Parsons Lathrop (born in Hawaii, August 25, 1851; died in 1898) was literally wedded to American literature, in that he married Rose, the second daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  She had inspired his youthful poems, and now collaborated with him in several prose works, as well as helped him materially in his master work, a biographical edition of the works of Hawthorne.  The fantastic conception of the present story is reminiscent of the imaginative tales of his father-in-law, but there is lacking the glamour of mysticism that Hawthorne would have thrown around it.  However, in aiming directly at the moral sense of his readers, instead of approaching this through the aesthetic sense, the obvious treatment of Lathrop gains in human interest more than it loses in literary quality.

IN FACH OTHER’S SHOES
BY GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP
[Footnote:  By permission of the publishers.  From “True and Other
Stories” copyright, 1884, by Punk & Wagnalls.]