cause! Just a trick of chance, a street accident! And Roger grew
bitter and rebelled. Bruce was not the one of the family to die. Bruce, so
shrewd and vigorous, so vital, the practical man of affairs. Bruce had been
going the pace that kills--yes, Roger had often thought of it. But that had
nothing to do with this! If Bruce had died at fifty, say, as a result of
the life he had chosen, the fierce exhausting city which he had loved as a
man will love drink, then at least there would have been some sense of
fairness in it all! If the town had let him alone till his time! But to be
knocked down by an automobile! The devilish irony of it! No
reason--nothing! Just hideous luck!

Well, life was like that. As for Edith and her children, he would be glad
to have them here. Only, it would be different, the house would have to
change again. He was sorry, too, for Deborah. No wedding trip as she had
planned, no home awaiting her return.

So his mind went over his family.

But suddenly such thoughts fell away as trivial and of small account. For
these people would still be alive. And Bruce was dead, and Roger was old.
So he thought about Bruce and about himself, and all his children grew
remote. "You will live on in our children's lives." Was there no other
immortality? The clock ticked on the mantle and beside it "The Thinker"
brooded down. And Roger looked up unafraid, but grim and gravely wondering.

CHAPTER XXII

But there was a rugged practical side to the character of Roger Gale, and
the next morning he was ashamed of the brooding thoughts which had come in
the night. He shook them off as morbid, and resolutely set himself to what
lay close before him. There was work to be done on Bruce's affairs, and the
work was a decided relief. Madge Deering, in the meantime, had offered to
go with Edith and the children to the mountains and see them all well
settled there. And a little talk he had with Madge relieved his mind still
further. What a recovery _she_ had made from the tragedy of years ago. How
alert and wide-awake she seemed. If Edith could only grow like that.

Soon after their departure, one night when he was dining alone, he had a
curious consciousness of the mingled presence of Edith and of Judith his
wife. And this feeling grew so strong that several times he looked about in
a startled, questioning manner. All at once his eye was caught by an old
mahogany sideboard. It was Edith's. It had been her mother's. E