"What if a son of mine was in a strange land ?" she inquired, self-reproachfully.

Greatly to her relief, I volunteered to go in pursuit of the wanderer, and, taking a cross-path over the fields, soon overtook him.

He had just been rejected at the house of our nearest neighbor, and was standing in a state of dubious perplexity in the street.

His looks quite justified my mother's suspicions.

He was an olive-complexioned, black-bearded Italian, with an eye like a live coal, such a face as perchance looks out on the traveller in the passes of the Abruzzi,--one of those bandit visages which Salvator has painted.