“I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie. 
    She’s as pure as the lily in the dell——­”

The voice grew louder; came in front of the house; came into the yard; came and sang just under Cora’s window.  There it fell silent a moment; then was lifted in a long peal of imbecile laughter, and sang again: 

“Then slowly, slowly rase she up And slowly she came nigh him, And when she drew the curtain by—­ `Young man I think you’re dyin’.’”

Cora’s door opened and closed softly, and Laura, barefooted, stole to the bed and put an arm about the shaking form of her sister.

“The drunken beast!” sobbed Cora.  “It’s to disgrace me!  That’s what he wants.  He’d like nothing better than headlines in the papers:  `Ray Vilas arrested at the Madison residence’!” She choked with anger and mortification.  “The neighbours——­”

“They’re nearly all away,” whispered Laura.  “You needn’t fear——­”

“Hark!”

The voice stopped singing, and began to mumble incoherently; then it rose again in a lamentable outcry: 

“Oh, God of the fallen, be Thou merciful to me!  Be Thou merciful—­merciful—­merciful” . . .

“MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL!” it shrieked, over and over, with increasing loudness, and to such nerve-racking effect that Cora, gasping, beat the bedclothes frantically with her hands at each iteration.

The transom over the door became luminous; some one had lighted the gas in the upper hall.  Both girls jumped from the bed, ran to the door, and opened it.  Their mother, wearing a red wrapper, was standing at the head of the stairs, which Mr. Madison, in his night-shirt and slippers, was slowly and heavily descending.

Before he reached the front door, the voice outside ceased its dreadful plaint with the abrupt anti-climax of a phonograph stopped in the middle of a record.  There was the sound of a struggle and wrestling, a turmoil in the wet shrubberies, branches cracking.

“Let me go, da——­” cried the voice, drowned again at half a word, as by a powerful hand upon a screaming mouth.

The old man opened the front door, stepped out, closing it behind him; and the three women looked at each other wanly during a hushed interval like that in a sleeping-car at night when the train stops.  Presently he came in again, and started up the stairs, heavily and slowly, as he had gone down.

“Richard Lindley stopped him,” he said, sighing with the ascent, and not looking up.  “He heard him as he came along the street, and dressed as quick as he could, and ran up and got him.  Richard’s taken him away.”

He went to his own room, panting, mopping his damp gray hair with his fat wrist, and looking at no one.

Cora began to cry again.  It was an hour before any of this family had recovered sufficient poise to realize, with the shuddering gratitude of adventurers spared from the abyss, that, under Providence, Hedrick had not wakened!