Meantime, General Hampden was facing a new foe. His health had suddenly given way, and he was in danger of becoming blind. His doctor had given him his orders—orders which possibly he might not have taken had not the spectre of a lonely old man in total darkness begun to haunt him. He had been “working too hard,” the doctor told him.

“Working hard! Of course, I have been working hard!” snapped the General, fiercely, with his black eyes glowering. “What else have I to do but work? I shall always work hard.”

The doctor knew something of the General 's trouble. He had been a surgeon in the hospital where young Oliver Hampden had been when Lucy Drayton found him.

“You must stop,” he said, quietly. “You will not last long unless you do.”

“How long!” demanded the General, quite calmly.

“Oh! I cannot say that. Perhaps, a year—perhaps, less. You have burned your candle too fast.” He glanced at the other's unmoved face. “You need change. You ought to go South this winter.”

“I should only change my skies and not my thoughts,” said the General, his memory swinging back to the past.

The doctor gazed at him curiously. “What is the use of putting out your eyes and working yourself to death when you have everything that money can give?”

“I have nothing! I work to forget that,” snarled the General, fiercely.

The doctor remained silent.

The General thought over the doctor's advice and finally followed it, though not for the reason the physician supposed.

Something led him to select the place where his son had gone and where his body lay amid the magnolias. If he was going to die, he would carry out a plan which he had formed in the lonely hours when he lay awake between the strokes of the clock. He would go and see that his son's grave was cared for, and if he could, would bring him back home at last. Doubtless, “that woman's” consent could be bought. She had possibly married again. He hoped she had.