thought he would remember, and which I now repeat to you. I told him
that a gentleman ceased to be a gentleman when once he gambled beyond
his means."

I waited to hear no more, but with crimson cheeks and head in air, I
turned on my heel and started for the door.

"Damn my stars, sir!" he roared. "Wait to hear me out."

But I would not wait. After a moment's struggle with the latch, I had the
door open and marched straight to my room. Once inside, I bolted the
door, and throwing myself on the floor, sobbed myself to sleep.

What need to detail further? There were a hundred such scenes between us
in the four years that followed, and as I look back upon them now, I
realize that through it all I, too, showed my full share of Stewart
obstinacy and temper. I more than suspect that my grandfather in his most
violent outbursts was inwardly trembling with tenderness for me, as was I
for him, and that a single gentle word, spoken at the right time, would
have brought us into each other's arms. And I realize too late that it
was for me, and not for him, to speak that word. It was only when I saw
him lying in his bed, stricken with paralysis, bereft of the power of
speech or movement, that I knew how great my love for him had been. His
eyes, as they met mine on that last day, had in them infinite tenderness
and pleading, and my heart melted as I bent and kissed his lips. He
struggled to speak, and the sweat broke from his forehead at the effort,
but what he would have said I can only guess, for he died that night,
without the iron bands which held him fast loosening for an instant. Yet
I love to fancy that his last words, could he have spoken them, would
have been words of love and forgiveness, for my father as well as for
myself, and such, I am sure, they would have been. With him there passed
away the only one at Riverview whom I had grown to love.

And now a word about the others among whom I passed the second period of
my boyhood. My father's younger brother, James, had married seven or
eight years before a lady whose estate adjoined Riverview,--Mrs.
Constance Randolph, a widow some years older than himself. She had one
child living, a daughter, Dorothy, who, at the time I came to Riverview,
was a girl of nine, and a year after her second marriage she bore a son,
who was named James, much against the wishes of his mother. She would
have called him Thomas, a name which had for five generations been that
of the head of the