Edna drew one of the white hands down to her lips and murmured: 

“Thank you—­thank you!  You shall never have cause to regret your goodness; and your wishes shall always guide me.”

“Well, well; I shall remember this promise, and trust I may never find it necessary to remind you of it.  I dare say we shall get on very happily together.  Don’t thank me any more, and hereafter we need not speak of the matter.”

Mrs. Murray stooped, and for the first time kissed the child’s white forehead; and Edna longed to throw her arms about the stately form, but the polished hauteur awed and repelled her.

Before she could reply, and just as Mrs. Murray was moving toward the door, it was thrown open, and a gentleman strode into the room.  At sight of Edna he stopped suddenly, and dropping a bag of game on the floor, exclaimed harshly: 

“What the d—­l does this mean?”

“My son!  I am so glad you are at home again.  I was getting quite uneasy at your long absence.  This is one of the victims of that terrible railroad disaster; the neighborhood is full of the sufferers.  Come to my room.  When did you arrive?”

She linked her arm in his, picked up the game-bag, and led him to the adjoining room, the door of which she closed and locked.

A painful thrill shot along Edna’s nerves, and an indescribable sensation of dread, a presentiment of coming ill, overshadowed her heart.  This was the son of her friend, and the first glimpse of him filled her with instantaneous repugnance; there was an innate and powerful repulsion which she could not analyze.  He was a tall, athletic man, not exactly young, yet certainly not elderly; one of anomalous appearance, prematurely old, and, though not one white thread silvered his thick, waving, brown hair, the heavy and habitual scowl on his high, full brow had plowed deep furrows such as age claims for its monogram.  His features were bold but very regular; the piercing, steel-gray eyes were unusually large, and beautifully shaded with long heavy, black lashes, but repelled by their cynical glare; and the finely formed mouth, which might have imparted a wonderful charm to the countenance, wore a chronic, savage sneer, as if it only opened to utter jeers and curses.  Evidently the face had once been singularly handsome, in the dawn of his earthly career, when his mother’s good-night kiss rested like a blessing on his smooth, boyish forehead, and the prayer learned in the nursery still crept across his pure lips; but now the fair, chiseled lineaments were blotted by dissipation, and blackened and distorted by the baleful fires of a fierce, passionate nature, and a restless, powerful, and unhallowed intellect.  Symmetrical and grand as that temple of Juno, in shrouded Pompeii, whose polished shafts gleamed centuries ago in the morning sunshine of a day of woe, whose untimely night has endured for nineteen hundred years, so, in the glorious flush of his youth, this man had stood facing a noble