Chester house was still brilliantly
illumined; his own dark except for the dim light in the office and--he
discovered it as he rounded the turn--a sort of half-radiance coming
from the windows of his own room, where Bob slept in the small bed
beside his own. Burns gazed anxiously at this, for it showed that
somebody had turned on the hooded electric. He was accustomed to leave
the door open into his private office; in which a light was always
burning, and with this Bob had hitherto been satisfied.

"He must have waked up and called for Cynthia," he decided. Housing the
Imp, he quietly crossed the lawn to the window, avoiding any sound of
footsteps on the gravelled paths. Both windows, screened by wire and
awnings, were wide open; he could see with ease into the room, for the
house was an old one and stood low. Climbing wistaria vines wreathed
the windows, and sheltered by these he found himself secure from
observation.

For after the first look he became exceedingly anxious not to be
discovered. He had come home in the stirred and gentle mood often
brought upon him by his part in such a scene as the one he had lately
left behind him. In the first wave of joy swept by a birth into a home,
whether humble or exalted, the man who has been of service in the hour
of trial is often caught and lifted into a sympathetic pleasure which
lasts for some time after he has gone on to less satisfying work. Burns
had often jeered gently at himself for being, as he considered, more
than ordinarily susceptible to a sort of odd tenderness of feeling under
such conditions, and as he stared in at the scene before him he was
uneasily conscious that he could not have come upon it at a more
vulnerable moment.

Bobby Burns was sitting straight up in bed, his cheeks flushed, his
eyelids reddened as if with prolonged crying, but his small face radiant
with happiness as he regarded his companion, his plump little fist
thrust tight into the hand which held his. In a chair close beside him
sat a figure in silvery white; bare, beautifully-moulded arms, from
which the gloves had been pulled and flung aside upon the bed, gleaming
in the glow from the hooded light.

Black head was close to black head, her black lashes and his disclosed
dark eyes curiously alike in the distracting glance of them; even the
colouring of the faces was similar, for both showed the warm and peachy
hues laid there by the summer sun.

"They might easily be mother and son,"