the short sharp
shoemaker's knife, looked at it, held it in his hands and pared his
coarse nails with it, whistling a little tune.

"That is a good knife," he observed carelessly.

The cobbler looked up and saw what he was doing.

"Black soul!" he cried out angrily. "That is my welt-knife, like a
razor, and he pares his hoofs with it!"

But Stefanone dropped it into the little box of tools on the front of
the bench, and whistled softly.

"You seem to me a silly boy!" said the cobbler, still wrathful.

"Apoplexy, how you talk!" answered Stefanone. "But I seem so to myself,
sometimes."

CHAPTER XLIV.

THE life of Paul Griggs was not less lonely than it had been before the
day on which he had received and read Gloria's letters to Reanda, but it
was changed. Everything which had belonged to the dead woman was gone
from the room in which he sat and worked as usual. Even the position of
the furniture was changed. But he worked on as steadily as before.

Outwardly he was very much the same man as ever. Any one who knew him
well--if such a person had existed--would have seen that there was a
little difference in the expression of his impassive face. The jaw was,
if possible, more firmly set than ever, but there was a line in the
forehead which had not been there formerly, and which softened the iron
front, as it were, with something more human. It had come suddenly, and
had remained. That was all.

But within, the difference was great and deep. He felt that the man who
sat all day long at the writing-table doing his work was not himself any
longer, but another being, his double and shadow, and in all respects
his slave, except in one.

That other man sometimes paused in his work, fingering the pen
unconsciously, as men do who hold it all day long, and thinking of
Gloria with an expression of horror and suffering in his eyes. But he,
the real Paul Griggs, never thought of her. The link was broken, the
thread that had carried the message of dead love between him and the
lonely grave beyond Subiaco was definitely broken. Stefanone came to
receive the small sum which Griggs paid him monthly for his care of the
place, and Griggs paid him as he would have paid his tailor,
mechanically, and made a note of the payment in his pocket-book. When
the man was gone, Griggs felt that his double was staring at the wall as
a man stares at the dark surface of the pool in which the thing he loves
has sunk for the last time.