CHAPTER [XLVI]. MRS. MAPLESON’S STORY CONCLUDED.
CHAPTER [XLVII]. AN UNEXPECTED RETURN.
CHAPTER [XLVIII]. PEACE AT LAST.
GEOFFREY’S VICTORY.
CHAPTER I.
A STRANGE ADVENTURE.
It was a beautiful winter night. The sky was brilliant with millions of beautiful stars that glowed and scintillated as if conscious that their light had never before penetrated an atmosphere so rarefied and pure. The earth was covered with a glaring coat of ice above newly fallen snow.
Trees and shrubs bent low and gracefully beneath the weight of icy jewels which adorned every twig and branch.
Every roof and spire, chimney and turret, gleamed like frosted silver beneath the star-lit heavens, while the overhanging eaves below were fringed with myriads of glistening points that seemed like pendulous diamonds, catching and refracting every ray of light from the glittering vault above and the gas-lit streets beneath.
But it was a night, too, of intense cold. Never within the remembrance of its oldest inhabitant had the mercury fallen so low in the city of Boston, as on this nineteenth of January, 185-.
So severe was the weather that nearly every street was deserted at an early hour of the evening; scarcely a pedestrian was to be seen at nine o’clock, and the brilliantly lighted thoroughfares had a lonely and desolate appearance without their accustomed flow of life and humanity. The luckless policemen, who alone paraded the slippery sidewalks on their round of duty, would now and then slink into sheltered nooks and door-ways for a brief respite from the stinging, frosty air, where they would vainly strive to excite a better circulation by the active swinging of arms and the vigorous stamping of feet.