beaten
thing, longing for the final surcease. And when the end came, it found
him in readiness, waiting in the big armchair by the windows. Even
now, a book lay on the frayed carpeting of the old room, where it had
fallen from relaxing fingers. Robert Fairchild picked it up, and with
a sigh restored it to the grim, fumed oak case. His days of petty
sacrifices that his father might while away the weary hours with
reading were over.

Memories! They were all about him, in the grate with its blackened
coals, the old-fashioned pictures on the walls, the almost gloomy
rooms, the big chair by the window, and yet they told him nothing
except that a white-haired, patient, lovable old man was gone,--a man
whom he was wont to call "father." And in that going, the slow
procedure of an unnatural existence had snapped for Robert Fairchild.
As he roamed about in his loneliness, he wondered what he would do now,
where he could go; to whom he could talk. He had worked since sixteen,
and since sixteen there had been few times when he had not come home
regularly each night, to wait upon the white-haired man in the big
chair, to discern his wants instinctively, and to sit with him, often
in silence, until the old onyx clock on the mantel had clanged eleven;
it had been the same program, day, week, month and year. And now
Robert Fairchild was as a person lost. The ordinary pleasures of youth
had never been his; he could not turn to them with any sort of grace.
The years of servitude to a beloved master had inculcated within him
the feeling of self-impelled sacrifice; he had forgotten all thought of
personal pleasures for their sake alone. The big chair by the window
was vacant, and it created a void which Robert Fairchild could neither
combat nor overcome.

What had been the past? Why the silence? Why the patient, yet
impatient wait for death? The son did not know. In all his memories
was only one faint picture, painted years before in babyhood: the
return of his father from some place, he knew not where, a long
conference with his mother behind closed doors, while he, in childlike
curiosity, waited without, seeking in vain to catch some explanation.
Then a sad-faced woman who cried at night when the house was still, who
faded and who died. That was all. The picture carried no explanation.

And now Robert Fairchild stood on the threshold of something he almost
feared to learn. Once, on a black, stormy night, they had sat