Such frequent loss of sleep, as might be expected, soon showed its results in the boy. Languid and pale during day-light, with large purple shadows beneath his eyes, thin and without appetite, yet animated by a constant liveliness of mind, joyous and over-flowing with inner happiness, he grew the subject of his mother's tenderest anxieties, and often in her sleep she turned to take the truant into her bosom. Once or twice not touching him in her drowsiness, his absence did not occur to her, but another time she started up filled with keen alarm, as he closed the street-door. Her quick call was smothered in affright. It was the work of an instant to gather a few garments and follow him just as he turned the corner of the street. Never dreaming of looking behind him, Fauntleroy hurried on, scaled the wall, and for the last time entered his sanctuary. His mother, less nimble, toiled up the hill, and, despairing at the wall, ran round to the gate. In the tremor that ruled her, she found it locked, and succeeded only, after several minutes, in remembering a broken part of the inclosure. Here she effected an entrance, but Fauntleroy was no where to be seen. Down one aisle and up another, across grassy plots and weed-choked flower-beds she ran breathlessly, and perhaps had not found him to this day, if a thought of the old piano had not struck her simultaneously with its sound. With suddenly-illumined thoughts she turned to the window whither the thread of music led her, and bending from one side, looked in. There was the dark, old-fashioned book-case, filling one side of the room from floor to ceiling, with a white bust of some irate Apollo in a niche of the arched carving, like a crown; the curtains swept apart for all the light the night could give; the buffet yielding a sidelong gleam, half drowned in shade, of silver and glass and gorgeously-flowered china; the chancel-chairs and velvet-covered table; and the mysterious portrait above the chimney-piece, that gathered all the spare light into itself and leaned from the dingy frame a pale, witch-like face, in a net of golden hair. All this his mother received at a glance, although that glance lighted instantly on her child, where he sat rapt in a softly-improvised welcome to his Egeria. So motionless was he, with uplifted eyes in the clear moon-light that streamed upon and over him into the room, that she half-feared him to be in a somnambulic state. Yet those violet eyes, so dark, so lustrous, wore no fixed stare, nor any trace of sleep; they were rather filled with spirit, brimmed with the wakefulness of life, and the heavenly dream of music alone overshadowed the transfigured face. The mother felt this as she gazed, and hung on the sweetness that his fingers drew into the air. Did ever any one do so beautifully, she thought; and, as if to mock her, a golden robin stirred in his nest and trilled his mid-night song, as full of joy as the whippowil's of sorrow.