Thorold's eyes. He might even have seen the shadow of
another bier cast upon the retina of his father's sight. He might have
seen through his father's watching the memory of another man who had
once lain on the very spot where Isador Framberg was lying, a man who
had died for his country after he had lived to set his country among the
free nations of the earth. But Peter Thorold saw only the boy who had
gone from a Forquier Street tenement to the Mexican sands that he might
prove by his dying that, with Irish, and Germans, and French, he too,
the lad who had been born in Kiev of the massacres, was an American.

With the surge of strange emotions flooding his heart, Peter Thorold
crossed to where his father stood apart. The tide of his thought
overflowed the shore of prose and landed his expression high on a
cliff of poetry. No chance, but the urging of his own exalted mood,
brought him the last lines of Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation":

"Then on your guiltier head
Shall our intolerable self-disdain
Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain;
For manifest in that disastrous light
We shall discern the right
And do it, tardily.--O ye who lead,
Take heed!
Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite."

But to the older man, seeing as he stood the picture of that other
catafalque to which he had crept one night in the lilac time of a year
nearly a half century agone, the words flung anathema. He leaned back
against the bronze grating of the shaft with a sudden look of age that
brought Peter's protective arm to his shoulder. Then, with Peter
following, he went out to the sun-bright street.

Like a man in a daze he dismissed his car, crossing pavements under
Peter's guiding until he came to the building where the fortunes of
the great Thorold mercantile business were administered. Through the
outer room, where clerks looked up in surprise at the appearance which
their chief presented on the morning when they had learned of the
Forsland embassy, he led Peter until they came to the room where he
had reigned for twenty years. It was a room that had always mirrored
James Thorold to his son. Tall bookcases, stiff, old-fashioned, held
long rows of legal works, books on history, essays on ethical topics,
and bound volumes of periodicals. Except for its maps, it was a lawyer's
room, although James Thorold never claimed either legal ability or legal
standing. Peter seldom entered it witho