the essence of the life that he had
lived there with her. Who would make that the same to him again?
Suddenly he recollected that in four days he was to ask Janie Iver for
her answer. Say a week now, for the funeral would enforce or excuse so
much postponement. Janie Iver would not give him back the life or the
atmosphere. A description of how he felt, had it been related to him a
year ago, would have appeared an absurdity. Yet these crowding
unexpected thoughts made not a hair's breadth of difference in what he
purposed. It was only that he became aware of an irreparable change of
scene; there was to be no change in his action. He was Tristram of Blent
now--that he must and would remain. But it was not the same Blent, and
did not seem as though it could be again. So much of the poetry had gone
out of it with Addie Tristram.

After he had left her room, he walked through the house, carrying a
shaded candle in his hand along the dark corridors of shining oak. He
bent his steps toward the long gallery which filled all the upper floor
of the left wing. Here were the Valhalla and the treasure-house of the
Tristrams, the pictures of ancestors, the cases of precious things which
the ancestors had amassed. At the end of this gallery Addie Tristram had
used to sit when she was well, in a large high-backed arm-chair by the
big window that commanded the gardens and the river. He flung the
window open and stood looking out. The wind swished in the trees and
the Blent washed along leisurely. A beautiful stillness was about him.
It was as though she were by his side, her fair head resting against the
old brocade cover of the arm-chair, her eyes wandering in delighted
employment round the room she had loved so well. Who should sit there
next? As he looked now at the room, now out into the night, his eyes
filled suddenly with tears; the love of the place came back to him, his
pride in it lived again, he would keep it not only because it was his
but because it had been hers before him. His blood spoke strong in him.
Suddenly he smiled. It was at the thought that all this belonged in law
to Miss Cecily Gainsborough--the house, the gallery, the pictures, the
treasures, the very chair where Addie Tristram had used to sit. Every
stick and stone about the place was Cecily Gainsborough's, aye, and the
bed of the Blent from shore to shore. He had nothing at all--according
to law.

Well, the law must have some honor, some recognition, at all