now, and his meeting with his mother and the rest of the household was

joyful--albeit he had been away so long that he seemed almost a stranger

in his own home.

But the greetings and congratulations were hardly finished when all the

journals in the land clamored the news of Laura's miserable death.

Mrs. Hawkins was prostrated by this last blow, and it was well that Clay

was at her side to stay her with comforting words and take upon himself

the ordering of the household with its burden of labors and cares.

Washington Hawkins had scarcely more than entered upon that decade

which carries one to the full blossom of manhood which we term the

beginning: of middle age, and yet a brief sojourn at the capital of the nation

had made him old. His hair was already turning gray when the late session

of Congress began its sittings; it grew grayer still, and rapidly, after the

memorable day that saw Laura proclaimed a murderess; it waxed grayer and

still grayer during the lagging suspense that succeeded it and after the

crash which ruined his last hope--the failure of his bill in the Senate

and the destruction of its champion, Dilworthy. A few days later, when

he stood uncovered while the last prayer was pronounced over Laura's

grave, his hair was whiter and his face hardly less old than the

venerable minister's whose words were sounding in his ears.

A week after this, he was sitting in a double-bedded room in a cheap

boarding house in Washington, with Col. Sellers. The two had been living

together lately, and this mutual cavern of theirs the Colonel sometimes

654

The Gilded Age