“A groan; then a gasping sigh from him, and silence settled upon the room and upon my heart, and so far as I knew upon the whole created world.

“That is my story, friends.  Do you wonder that I have never been or lived like other men?”

After a few moments of sympathetic silence, Mr. Van Broecklyn went on, to say: 

“I don’t think I ever had a moment’s doubt that my parents both lay dead on the floor of that great room.  When I came to myself—­ which may have been soon, and may not have been for a long while—­ the lightning had ceased to flash, leaving the darkness stretching like a blank pall between me and that spot in which were concentrated all the terrors of which my imagination was capable.  I dared not enter it.  I dared not take one step that way.  My instinct was to fly and hide my trembling body again in my own bed; and associated with this, in fact dominating it and making me old before my time, was another—­never to tell; never to let any one, least of all my grandfather—­know what that forbidden room now contained.  I felt in an irresistible sort of way that my father’s and mother’s honour was at stake.  Besides, terror held me back; I felt that I should die if I spoke.  Childhood has such terrors and such heroisms.  Silence often covers in such, abysses of thought and feeling which astonish us in later years.  There is no suffering like a child’s, terrified by a secret which it dare not for some reason disclose.

“Events aided me.  When, in desperation to see once more the light and all the things which linked me to life—­my little bed, the toys on the window-sill, my squirrel in its cage—­I forced myself to retraverse the empty house, expecting at every turn to hear my father’s voice or come upon the image of my mother—­yes, such was the confusion of my mind, though I knew well enough even then that they were dead and that I should never hear the one or see the other.  I was so benumbed with the cold in my half-dressed condition, that I woke in a fever next morning after a terrible dream which forced from my lips the cry of ’Mother!  Mother!’—­ only that.

“I was cautious even in delirium.  This delirium and my flushed cheeks and shining eyes led them to be very careful of me.  I was told that my mother was away from home; and when after two days of search they were quite sure that all effort to find either her or my father were likely to prove fruitless, that she had gone to Europe where we would follow her as soon as I was well.  This promise, offering as it did, a prospect of immediate release from the terrors which were consuming me, had an extraordinary effect upon me.  I got up out of my bed saying that I was well now and ready to start on the instant.  The doctor, finding my pulse equable, and my whole condition wonder fully improved, and attributing it, as was natural, to my hope of soon joining my mother, advised my whim to be humoured and this hope kept active till travel and intercourse with children should give