ly
past. I suppose I ought to hate him too . . ."

He became aware of his eyes being wet. It was not that the man was his
father. For him it was purely a matter of hearsay which could not in
itself cause this emotion. No! It was because he had looked at him so
long that he missed him so much. The dead man had kept him on the bank
by his side. And now Heyst felt acutely that he was alone on the bank of
the stream. In his pride he determined not to enter it.

A few slow tears rolled down his face. The rooms, filling with shadows,
seemed haunted by a melancholy, uneasy presence which could not express
itself. The young man got up with a strange sense of making way for
something impalpable that claimed possession, went out of the house, and
locked the door. A fortnight later he started on his travels--to "look
on and never make a sound."

The elder Heyst had left behind him a little money and a certain
quantity of movable objects, such as books, tables, chairs, and
pictures, which might have complained of heartless desertion after many
years of faithful service; for there is a soul in things. Heyst, our
Heyst, had often thought of them, reproachful and mute, shrouded and
locked up in those rooms, far away in London with the sounds of the
street reaching them faintly, and sometimes a little sunshine, when
the blinds were pulled up and the windows opened from time to time in
pursuance of his original instructions and later reminders. It seemed
as if in his conception of a world not worth touching, and perhaps not
substantial enough to grasp, these objects familiar to his childhood and
his youth, and associated with the memory of an old man, were the only
realities, something having an absolute existence. He would never have
them sold, or even moved from the places they occupied when he looked
upon them last. When he was advised from London that his lease had
expired, and that the house, with some others as like it as two peas,
was to be demolished, he was surprisingly distressed.

He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. Already
the Tropical Belt Coal Company was in existence. He sent instructions
to have some of the things sent out to him at Samburan, just as any
ordinary, credulous person would have done. They came, torn out from
their long repose--a lot of books, some chairs and tables, his father's
portrait in oils, which surprised Heyst by its air of youth, because he
remembered his father as