as he saw them--his
success and his power and his glory. But to-night he hides the paper
under his gray coat and slips into the house. She and her son sit down
to dinner alone. This must be a stage dinner they are eating--though
it is all behind the scenes; for Mr. Barclay is merely going through
the empty form of eating. "No, thank you," for the roast. "Why, Mr.
Barclay did not touch his soup!" "Well," says the cook, tasting it
critically, "that's strange." And "No, thank you" for the salad, and
"Not any pie to-night, Clara." "What--none of the mince pie, John?
Why, I went out in the kitchen and made it for you myself." "Well, a
little."

Heigh-ho! We sigh, and we drum on our table-cloth with our fingers,
and we are trying to find some way to tell something. We have been a
bad boy, maybe--a bad little boy, and must own up; that is part of
our punishment--the hardest part perhaps, even with the curtain down,
even with the noise in front, even with the maid gone, even when a
mother comes and strokes our head, as we sit idly at the organ bench,
unable to sound a key. Shall the curtain go up now? Shall we sit
gawking while a boy gropes his way out of a man's life, back through
forty years, and puts his head in shame and sorrow against a mother's
breast? How he stumbles and falters and halts, as the truth comes
out--and it must come out; on the whole the best thing there is to
say of John Barclay on that fateful December day in the year of our
Lord 1903 is that he did not let his mother learn the truth from any
lips but his. And so it follows naturally, because he was brave and
kind, that instead of having to strengthen her, she sustained
him--she in her seventies, he in his fifties.

"My poor dear child," she said, "I know--I know. But don't worry,
John--don't worry. I don't mind. Jane won't mind, I am sure, and I
know Jennie will understand. It isn't what even we who love you think
of you, John--it is what you are that counts. Oh, Johnnie, Johnnie,
maybe you could serve your country and humanity in jail--by showing
the folly and the utter uselessness of all this money-getting, just as
your father served it by dying. I would not mind if it made men see
that money isn't the thing--if it made you see it, my boy; if you
could come out of a jail with that horrible greed for money purged
from you--"

But no--we will not peep behind the curtain; we will not dwell with
John Barclay as he walked all night up and down the grea