hesitated. He stood over the register, and vaguely held his
hands in the pleasant warmth indirectly radiated from the steam-pipes
below.

"The young ladies were just thinking you wouldn't be home till the next
train," the man suggested, at the sound of voices from the dining-room.

"They have some one with them?" Northwick asked.

"Yes, sir. The rector, sir; Mr. Wade, sir."

"I'll come down by and by," Northwick said, turning to the stairs. "Say
I had a late lunch before I left town."

"Yes, sir," said the man.

Northwick went on up stairs, with footfalls hushed by the thickly-padded
thick carpet, and turned into the sort of study that opened out of his
bedroom. It had been his wife's parlor during the few years of her life
in the house which he had built for her, and which they had planned to
spend their old age in together. It faced southward, and looked out over
the greenhouses and the gardens, that stretched behind the house to the
bulk of woods, shutting out the stage-picturesqueness of the summer
settlement of South Hatboro'. She had herself put the rocking-chair in
the sunny bay-window, and Northwick had not allowed it to be disturbed
there since her death. In an alcove at one side he had made a place for
the safe where he kept his papers; his wife had intended to keep their
silver in it, but she had been scared by the notion of having burglars
so close to them in the night, and had always left the silver in the
safe in the dining-room.

She was all her life a timorous creature, and after her marriage had
seldom felt safe out of Northwick's presence. Her portrait, by Hunt,
hanging over the mantelpiece, suggested something of this, though the
painter had made the most of her thin, middle-aged blond good looks, and
had given her a substance of general character which was more expressive
of his own free and bold style than of the facts in the case. She was
really one of those hen-minded women, who are so common in all walks of
life, and are made up of only one aim at a time, and of manifold
anxieties at all times. Her instinct for saving long survived the days
of struggle in which she had joined it to Northwick's instinct for
getting; she lived and died in the hope, if not the belief, that she had
contributed to his prosperity by looking strictly after all manner of
valueless odds and ends. But he had been passively happy with her; since
her death, he had allowed her to return much into his thoughts, from
wh