f dust on the shining floor. Straight ahead he saw
the garden, lying graceless and deserted, with the unkemptness of
extreme old age. A sharp breeze blew from door to door, and the dried
grasses on the wall stirred with a sound like that of the wind among a
bed of rushes.

He mounted the stairs slowly, the weight of his tread creaking the
polished wood. Before the threshold of the judge's room again he
hesitated, his hand upraised. The house was so still that it seemed to
be untenanted, and he shivered suddenly, as if the wind that rustled the
dried grasses were a ghostly footstep. Then, as he glanced back down the
wide old stairway, his own childhood looked up, at him--an alien figure,
half frightened by the silence.

As he stood there the door opened noiselessly, and the doctor came out,
peering with shortsighted eyes over his lowered glasses. When he ran
against Nicholas he coughed uncertainly and drew back. "Well, well, if
it isn't the governor!" he said. "We have been looking for Tom--but our
friend the judge is better--much better. I tell him he'll live yet to
see us buried."

A load passed suddenly from Nicholas's mind. The ravaged face of the old
doctor--with its wrinkled forehead and its almost invisible
eyes--became at once the mask of a good angel. He grasped the
outstretched hand and crossed the threshold.

The judge was lying among the pillows of his bed, his eyes closed, his
great head motionless. There was a bowl of yellow chrysanthemums on a
table beside him, and near it Mrs. Burwell was measuring dark drops into
a wineglass. She looked up with a smile of welcome that cast a cheerful
light about the room. Her smile and the colour of the chrysanthemums
were in Nicholas's eyes as he went to the bed and laid his hand upon the
still fingers that clasped the counterpane.

The judge looked at him with a wavering recognition. "Ah, it is you,
Tom," he said, and there was a yearning in his voice that fell like a
gulf between him and the man who was not his son. At the moment it came
to Nicholas with a great bitterness that his share of the judge's heart
was the share of an outsider--the crumbs that fall to the beggar that
waits beside the gate. When the soul has entered the depths and looks
back again it is the face of its own kindred that it craves--the
responsive throbbing of its own blood in another's veins. This was Tom's
place, not his.

He leaned nearer, speaking in an expressionless voice. "It's I,