his body; but he, himself, was not here. Dead! The word struck harshly
on his mind and roused him from his reverie. He looked up; the boys
had all gone, only the kind-faced woman stood there with a puzzled
expression in her eyes. She had chanced to mark the strong resemblance
between the face of the dead man and that of the boy who looked upon
it; a resemblance so striking that it startled her. In the countenance
of Robert Burnham as he had looked in life, one might not have noticed
it, but--

"Sometimes, in a dead man's face,
To those that watch it more and more,
A likeness, hardly seen before,
Comes out, to some one of his race."

It was so here. The faces of the dead man and of the living boy were
the faces of father and son.

Ralph turned away, at last, from the lifeless presence before him,
from the searching eyes of the woman, from the hall with its dim
suggestions of something in the long ago, and went out into the
street, into the sunlight, into the busy world around him; but from
that time forth a shadow rested on his young life that had never
darkened it before,--a shadow whose cause he could not fathom and
whose gloom he could not dispel.




CHAPTER V.