Dunstan," he harshly laughed.
"Moi qui vous parle! The last."

Penzance's eyes resting on him took upon themselves the far-seeing
look of a man who watches the world of life without living in it. He
presently shook his head.

"No," he said. "I don't see that. No--not the last. Believe me."

And singularly, in truth, Mount Dunstan stood still and gazed at him
without speaking. The eyes of each rested in the eyes of the other. And,
as had happened before, they followed the subject no further. From that
moment it dropped.

Only Penzance had known of his reasons for going to America. Even the
family solicitors, gravely holding interviews with him and restraining
expression of their absolute disapproval of such employment of his
inadequate resources, knew no more than that this Mount Dunstan, instead
of wasting his beggarly income at Cairo, or Monte Carlo, or in Paris as
the last one had done, prefers to waste it in newer places. The head
of the firm, when he bids him good-morning and leaves him alone, merely
shrugs his shoulders and returns to his letter writing with the corners
of his elderly mouth hard set.

Penzance saw him off--and met him upon his return. In the library they
sat and talked it over, and, having done so, closed the book of the
episode.

*****

He sat at the table, his eyes upon the wide-spread loveliness of the
landscape, but his thought elsewhere. It wandered over the years already
lived through, wandering backwards even to the days when existence,
opening before the child eyes, was a baffling and vaguely unhappy thing.

When the door opened and Penzance was ushered in by a servant, his face
wore the look his friend would have been rejoiced to see swept away to
return no more.

Then let us take our old accustomed seat and begin some casual talk,
which will draw him out of the shadows, and make him forget such things
as it is not good to remember. That is what we have done many times in
the past, and may find it well to do many a time again.

He begins with talk of the village and the country-side. Village stories
are often quaint, and stories of the countryside are sometimes--not
always--interesting. Tom Benson's wife has presented him with triplets,
and there is great excitement in the village, as to the steps to be
taken to secure the three guineas given by the Queen as a reward for
this feat. Old Benny Bates has announced his intention of taking a fifth
wife at the age of ninety, and is