ellowship, visits late at
night to the chambers of new friends--chambers rich in furniture
and pictures, friends richer in old names and fine manners and
beautiful boyish gallant ways; his club and his secret society, and
the whole bewildering maddening enchantment of student life, where
work and duty and lights and wine and poverty and want and flesh
and spirit strive together each for its own. At this point he put
these memories away, locked them from himself in their long silence.

Near midnight he made his way quietly back into the main hall. He
turned out the lamps and lighted his bedroom candle and started
toward the stairway, holding it in front of him a little above his
head, a low-moving star through the gloom. As he passed between
two portraits, he paused with sudden impulse and, going over to
one, held his candle up before the face and studied it once more.
A man, black-browed, black-robed, black-bearded, looked down into
his eyes as one who had authority to speak. He looked far down
upon his offspring, and he said to him: "You may be one of those
who through the flesh are chosen to be damned. But if He chooses
to damn you, then be damned, but do not question His mercy or His
justice: it is not for you to alter the fixed and the eternal."

He crossed with his candle to the opposite wall and held it up
before another face: a man full of red blood out to the skin;
full-lipped, red-lipped; audacious about the forehead and brows,
and beautiful over his thick careless hair through which a girl's
fingers seemed lately to have wandered. He looked level out at his
offspring as though he still stood throbbing on the earth and he
spoke to him: "I am not alive to speak to you with my voice, but I
have spoken to you through my blood. When the cup of life is
filled, drain it deep. Why does nature fill it if not to have you
empty it?"

He blew his candle out in the eyes of that passionate face, and
holding it in his hand, a smoking torch, walked slowly backward and
forward in the darkness of the hall with only a little pale
moonlight struggling in through a window here and there.

Then with a second impulse he went over and stood close to the dark
image who had descended into him through the mysteries of nature.
"You," he said, "who helped to make me what I am, you had the
conscience and not the temptation. And you," he said, turning to
the hidden face across the hall, "who helped to make me what I am,
you h