cleared and softened, and his eye perceptibly
brightened. He was clean-shaven once more, and his dress, while of
strict simplicity, was yet suggestive of the old days when he had been
called the most fastidious man in Kenton City. He held himself
straighter, too, with his shoulders thrown back and his head up; and
Barclay had noted, with quiet gratification, that there was not a
tremor about the hands which unfolded and smoothed the bills he had come
to return. One evidence alone remained of the desperate ordeal through
which he had passed. His voice, formerly firm and vibrant with a spirit
that was half gayety, half arrogance, was now indescribably modulated,
and touched with a melancholy which was not that of servility, still
less of shame. Rather, it was an unspeakably appealing regret, a
monotonous listlessness, a suggestion of hopeless surrender to something
tragic and inevitable. Barclay was puzzled by it. It seemed illogical,
and evaded him, like a melody with a dimly familiar _motif_ which he was
unable to place or even fully recall. It haunted him singularly, when
Cavendish had left, and afterwards, in his leisure moments, came back to
him, striving, as he fancied, to make itself understood. Intimately
candid as their recent relation had been, here was something
unexplained, which he could not come at, and which was yet eloquent of
vitality, of the need of comprehension.

Since that time, three weeks before, the two men had not met. For this
there were several reasons. Barclay knew from a brief note that
Cavendish had taken a small room in a boarding-house, not far from the
"Rockingham," and that the pressure of his work for the "Sentinel" set
him afoot so early, and sent him home at night so brain and body weary,
that he had neither the strength nor the inclination for other things.
Added to this, had been the Lieutenant-Governor's absorption in his own
duties, and, in particular, his absence from Kenton City, on his round
of inspection of the state militia. But, just before the dinner hour, on
the evening following that of the review, Cavendish called, as Barclay
was in the act of dressing.

"I had a suspicion I'd catch you just about this time," he said,
dragging a chair to the door of the bedroom, where he could watch the
Lieutenant-Governor struggling with a refractory white tie. "I'm getting
on famously, and I wanted you to know it."

"That's right!" said Barclay, scowling into the mirror. "But then, I