"Die before night! Absurd! But keep the things; keep them. I can do
without them if you will restore the child himself to me. When did you
say you would bring him?"

"Friday afternoon."

"Until Friday afternoon, then, I wait."

"Very well, sir; good day!"

"Good day!"

The old man picked up his cane, rose slowly from his chair, and, with
his satchel in his hand, walked softly out, closing the door carefully
behind him.

Robert Burnham continued his walk up and down the room, his flushed
face showing alternately the signs of the hope and the doubt that were
striving for the mastery within him.

For eight years he had believed his boy to be dead. The terrible
wreck at Cherry Brook had yielded up to him from its ashes only a few
formless trinkets of all that had once been his child's, only a few
unrecognizable bones, to be interred, long afterward, where flowers
might bloom above them. The last search had been made, the last clew
followed, the last resources of wealth and skill were at an end, and
these, these bones and trinkets were all that could be found. Still,
the fact of the child's death had not been established beyond all
question, and among the millions of remote possibilities that this