ntained. The gold entered the
room uncertainly, dimly, filtering in by the small apertures and
striking across to the cavernous fireplace.

Rand knew it was but a trick of the light touching here and there in
mote-filled shafts,--a trick of the light aiding the vagaries of an
overwrought brain. He put forth his arm and found that it was so--there
was no chair there and no figure seated in the chair. It was a trick of
the light and an effect of imagination, an imagination that was hounded,
day by day, from depth to pinnacle, from pinnacle to depth, back and
forth like a shuttlecock in giant hands. No chair was there and no
seated figure. He sank back on the settle and found that he saw them
both.

The first sick leap of the heart was past. What he saw, he knew, was a
mere effect of light and shadow and tragically heightened fancy: when he
moved in a certain direction, the dim picture faded, broke into pieces,
was gone; but lean far back in the settle, look out with eyes of one
awakened from a maze of fearful dreams, and there it was again! He had
no terror of it; what was it at last but the projection of a face and
form with which his mind had long--had long been occupied? It had ousted
the vision of his father; and that, too, was not strange, seeing that,
day by day, the thought of the one--the one--the one had grown more and
yet more insistent. "Cary," said Rand, in a hollow voice, "Cary!"

The light and shadow made no answer. Rand waited, gazing with some
fixedness, and imagination at white heat saw the head, the face, the
form, the quiet dress, the whole air of the man, the look within his
eyes and the smile upon his lips. The figure sat at ease, as of old it
had sat upon the Justice's Bench the day of the election, as it had sat
beside the bed in the blue room at Fontenoy. Imagination laid Lewis Rand
again in that room, showed him the mandarin screen, the sunny, happy
morning, the pansies in the bowl. "If," he cried,--"if I had died then,
I had not died a wicked man. Cary--Cary--Cary! I am in torment!"

There came no reply. Rand bowed his head. Without, in the afternoon sky,
a cloud hid the sun. When the solitary man in the deserted house looked
again, there were no shafts of light, no dark between to create
illusion; all was even dusk, forbidding, grey, and cold. He rose from
the settle and left the room and the house. Selim whinnied at the gate,
and his master, coming swiftly down the path and out of the enclos