saw his
uncle and aunt kneeling there, their heads made enormous shadows on the
wall.

Harry also bent down and kissed his father; the old man held his hand
and kept it--

"I've tried to be a fair man and a gentleman--I've not been a good one.
But I've had some fun and seen life--thank God, I was born a Trojan--so
will the rest of you. Harry, my boy, you're all right--you'll do. I'm
going, but I don't regret anything--your sins are experience--and the
greatest sin of all is not having any."

His lips closed--as the fire flashed with the falling of a cavern of
blazing coal his head rolled back on to the pillow.

Suddenly he smiled--

"Dear old Harry!" he said, and then he died.

The shadows from the fire leapt and danced on the wall, and the
kneeling figures by the bed flung grotesque shapes over the dead man.

CHAPTER XV

It was five o'clock of the same day and Harry was asleep in front of
his fire. In the early hours of the afternoon the strain under which
he had been during the past week began to assert itself, and every part
of his body seemed to cry out for sleep.

His head was throbbing, his legs trembled, and strange lights and
figures danced before his eyes; he flung himself into a chair in his
small study at the top of the West Tower and fell asleep.

He had grown to love that room very dearly: the great stretch of the
sea and the shining sand with the grey bending hills hemming it in;
that view was never the same, but with the passing of every cloud held
new colours like a bowl of shining glass.

The room was bare and simple--that had been his own wish; a photograph
of his first wife hung over the mantelpiece, a small sketch of Auckland
Harbour, a rough drawing of the Terraces before their
destruction--these were all his pictures.

He had been trying to read since his return, and copies of "The Egoist"
and some of Swinburne's poetry lay on the table; but the first had
seemed incomprehensible to him and the second indecent, and he had
abandoned them; but he _had_ made one discovery, thanks to Bethel, Walt
Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"--it seemed to him the greatest book that he
had ever read, the very voicing of all his hopes and ideals and faith.
Ah! that man knew!

Benham came in and drew the curtains. He watched the sleeping man for
a moment and nodded his head. He was the right sort, Mr. Harry! He
would do!--and the Watcher of the House stole out again.

Harry slept on, a great,