dy for
some three years or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age--was
deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two
windows. It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table
was fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same
drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra with four candles each lighted
up festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering
nephew. The blinds were down.

Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first
peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal grandfather's estate,
the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family; and
beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there
lay the great unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly
bread-giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black
patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had come
ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the
short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snowtrack; a quick tinkle
of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a tuneful
whisper.

My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to help
me, and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but unnecessary
at the door of the room. I did not want him in the least, but I did not
like to tell him to go away. He was a young fellow, certainly more than
ten years younger than myself; I had not been--I won't say in that place
but within sixty miles of it, ever since the year '67; yet his guileless
physiognomy of the open peasant type seemed strangely familiar. It was
quite possible that he might have been a descendant, a son or even a
grandson, of the servants whose friendly faces had been familiar to me
in my early childhood. As a matter of fact he had no such claim on my
consideration. He was the product of some village near by and was there
on his promotion, having learned the service in one or two houses as
pantry-boy. I know this because I asked the worthy V-- next day. I might
well have spared the question. I discovered before long that all the
faces about the house and all the faces in the village: the grave faces
with long moustaches of the heads of families, the downy faces of the
young men, the faces of the little fair-haired children, the handsome,
tanned, wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the doors of the huts