room. He had, moreover, his hours of regret
for vanished conviviality; he wished to step out into a London street,
collect his boon-companions, and hold revel in the bygone way. These,
however, were still but fugitive moods. All in all, he regretted
nothing. Destiny seemed to have marked him for a bookish man; he grew
more methodical, more persistent, in his historical reading; this,
doubtless, was the appointed course for his latter years. It led to
nothing definite. His life would be fruitless----

Fruitless? There sounded from somewhere in the house a shrill little
cry, arresting his thought, and controverting it without a syllable.
Nay, fruitless his life could not be, if his child grew up. Only the
chosen few, the infinitesimal minority of mankind, leave spiritual
offspring, or set their single mark upon the earth; the multitude are
but parents of a new generation, live but to perpetuate the race. It is
the will of nature, the common lot. And if indeed it lay within his
power to shape a path for this new life, which he, nature's slave, had
called out of nothingness,--to obviate one error, to avert one
misery,--to ensure that, in however slight degree, his son's existence
should be better and happier than his own,--was not this a sufficing
purpose for the years that remained to him, a recompense adequate to
any effort, any sacrifice?

As he sat thus in reverie, the door softly opened, and Alma looked in
upon him.

'Do I interrupt you?'

'I'm idling. How is your headache?'

She answered with a careless gesture, and came forward, a letter in her
hand.

'Sibyl says she will certainly be starting for home in a few weeks.
Perhaps they're on the way by now. You have the same news, I hear.'

'Yes. They must come to us straight away,' replied Harvey, knocking the
ash out of his pipe 'Or suppose we go to meet them? If they come by the
Orient Line, they call at Naples. How would it be to go overland, and
make the voyage back with them?'

Alma seemed to like the suggestion, and smiled, but only for a moment.
She had little colour this morning, and looked cold, as she drew up to
the fire, holding a white woollen wrap about her shoulders. A slow and
subtle modification of her features was tending to a mature beauty
which would make bolder claim than the charm that had characterised her
in maidenhood. It was still remote from beauty of a sensual type, but
the outlines, in becoming a little more rounded, more regular, g