Did they think of him, and talk with so much delight of his return?
Alas! no.

He brought no sunshine to their cheerless abode.
"Wretch! wretch!" he said to himself, striking his hand hard against his bosom.

"A curse to them!--a curse to myself!" For an hour the unhappy man stayed out in the chilly air; but he did not feel the cold.

Then he re-entered the house, but did not go into the room where the happy mother sat with her children, but to the lonely attic where he slept.
Twenty miles away lived the wife and three children of Foster.

The oldest boy was eleven years of age, and the youngest child, a little girl, just five.