aster. He had learned self-preservation, but at what a cost!
Where were the sharp sweet pangs of life that had been used to assail
him before he anchored in this calm? Daring was a lost word to him. Was
it true he was to have no more stormy risings of hot life, no more
passions of just rage or even righteous hate, because he had taught
himself to rule his blood? Now when his heart ached in anticipatory
warning over his son's going, why must he think of ways to be calm, as
if being calm were the aim of man? Laboriously he had learned how not to
waste himself, and the negation of life which is old age and then death
had fallen upon him. He laughed a little, bitterly, and Anne, coming to
find him as she did from time to time, to make sure he was comfortable,
smiled, hearing it, and asked:

"What is it, Farvie?"

He looked up into her kind face as if it were strange to him. At that
moment he and life were having it out together. Even womanly sweetness
could not come between.

"Anne," said he, "I'm an old man."

"Oh, no, Farvie!" She was smoothing his shoulder with her slender hand.
"No!"

But even she could not deny it. To her youth, he knew, he must seem old.
Yet her service, her fostering love, had only made him older. She had
copied his own attitude. She had helped him not to die, and yet to sink
into the ambling pace of these defended years.

"Damn it, Anne!" he said, with suddenly frowning brow, and now she
started. She had never heard an outbreak from courtly Farvie. "I wish
I'd been more of a man."

She did not understand him, and her eyes questioned whether he was ill.
He read the query. That was it, he thought impotently. They had all
three of them been possessed by that, the fear that he was going to be
ill.

"Yes," he said, "I wish I'd been more of a man. I should be more of a
man now."

She slipped away out of the room. He thought he had frightened her. But
in a moment she was back with some whiskey, hot, in a glass. The colonel
wanted to order her off and swear his nerves would be as taut without
it. But how could he? There was the same traitorous trembling in his
legs, and he put out his hand and took the glass, and thanked her. The
thanks sounded like the courteous, kind father she knew; but when she
had carried the glass into the kitchen she stood a moment, her hand on
the table, and thought, the lines of trouble on her forehead: what had
been the matter with him?

Jeff, when he got out of the