But to get them. To go now to the white house on the hill; to face that
old life even for an hour, a knocking at the door of a haunted house--he
shrank from the thought. He would have to enter the place like a thief
in the night.

Yet for Rosalie he must take the risk--he must go.

CHAPTER XLIX. THE OPEN GATE

It was a still night, and the moon, delicately bright, gave forth that
radiance which makes spiritual to the eye the coarsest thing. Inside
the white house on the hill all was dark. Sleep had settled on it long
before midnight, for, on the morrow, its master and mistress hoped to
make a journey to the valley of the Chaudiere, where the Passion Play
was being performed by habitants and Indians. The desire to see the
play had become an infatuation in the minds of the two, eager for some
interest to relieve the monotony of a happy life.

But as all slept, a figure in the dress of a habitant moved through the
passages of the house stealthily, yet with an assurance unusual in the
thief or housebreaker. In the darkest passages his step was sure, and
his hand fastened on latch or door-knob with perfect precision. He came
at last into a large hallway flooded by the moon, pale, watchful,
his beard frosted by the light. In the stillness of his tread and the
composed sorrow of his face he seemed like one long dead who "revisits
the glimpses of the moon."

At last he entered a room the door of which stood wide open. In this
room had been begotten, or had had exercise, whatever of him was worth
approving in the days before he died. It was a place of books and
statues and tapestry, and the dark oak was nobly smutched of Time. This
sombre oaken wall had been handed down through four generations from
the man's great-grandfather: the breath of generations had steeped it in
human association.

Entering, he turned for an instant with clinched hands to look at
another door across the hall. Behind that door were two people who
despised his memory, who conspired to forget his very name. This house
was the woman's, for he had given it to her the day he died. But that
she could live there with all the old associations, with memories that,
however bitter, however shaming, had a sort of sacredness, struck
into his soul with a harrowing pain. There she was whom he had
spared--himself; whose happiness had lain in his hands, and he had given
it to her. Yet her very existence robbed himself of happiness, and made
sorrowful a life