d you. If you want him, there is the staircase."

"No. I do not want him," said Lord Redin, and he turned away abruptly.

"As you please," growled the cobbler without looking up again.

CHAPTER XLII.

PAUL GRIGGS had gone back to the house in the Via della Frezza after his
return from America, and lived alone in the little apartment in which
the happy days of his life had been spent. He was a man able to live two
lives,--the one in the past, the other in the active present. It was his
instinct to be alone in his sorrow, and alone in the struggle which lay
before him, for himself and his child. But he would have with him all
that could make the memory of Gloria real. The reality of such things
softened with their contrast the hardness of life.

He had taken the same rooms again. Out of boxes and trunks stored in a
garret of the house, he had taken many things which had belonged to
Gloria. Alone, he had arranged the rooms as they used to be. His
writing-table stood in the same place, and near it was Gloria's chair;
beside it, the little stand with her needlework, her silks, her
scissors, and her thimble, all as it used to be. A novel she had once
read when sitting there lay upon the chair. Many little objects which
had belonged to her were all in their accustomed places. On the
mantelpiece the cheap American clock ticked loudly as in old days.

Day after day, as of old, he sat in his place at work. He had made the
room so alive with her that sometimes, looking up from a long spell of
writing, he forgot, and stared an instant at the bedroom door, and
listened for her footstep. Those were his happiest moments, though each
was killed in turn by the vision of a lonely grave among rocks.

With intensest longing he called her back to him. In his sleep, the last
words he had spoken to her were spoken again by his unconscious lips in
the still, dark night. Everything in him called her, his living soul and
his strong bodily self. There were times when he knew that if he opened
his eyes, shut to see her, he should see her really, there in her chair.
He looked, trembling, and there was nothing. In dreams he sought her and
could not find her, though he wandered in dark places, across endless
wastes of broken clods of earth and broken stone. It was as though her
grave covered the whole world round, and his path lay on the shadowed
arms of an infinite great cross. And again the grey dawn awoke him from
the search, to feel