nt face. For a long time he retained his
crouching seat on the wooden stool that stood before the hearth; then at
last the activity at work within his mind made further inaction
intolerable. He rose and turned towards the bed.

The dying man lay motionless, awaiting the final summons with that
aloofness that suggests a spirit already partially extricated from its
covering of flesh. His glassy eyes were still fixed and immovable save
for an occasional twitching of the eyelids; his pallid lips were drawn
back from his strong, prominent teeth; and the skin about his temples
looked shrivelled and sallow. The doctor's parting words came sharply to
the younger man's mind.

"Sit still and watch him--you can do no more."

He reiterated this injunction many times mentally as he stood
contemplating the man who for seven interminable years had ruled,
repressed, and worked him as he might have worked a well-constructed,
manageable machine; and a sudden rush of joy, of freedom and recompense
flooded his heart and set his pulses throbbing. He momentarily lost
sight of the grim shadow hovering over the house. The sense of
emancipation rose tumultuously, over-ruling even the immense solemnity
of approaching Death.

John Henderson had known little of the easy, pleasant paths of
life, carpeted by wealth and sheltered by influence. His most
childish and distant recollections carried him back to days of
anxious poverty. His father, the elder son of a wealthy Scottish
landowner, had quarrelled with his father, and at the age of
twenty left his home, disinherited in favor of his younger brother.
Possessed of a peculiar temperament--passionate, headstrong, dogged
in his resolves, he had shaken the dust of Scotland from his feet;
sworn never to be beholden to either father or brother for the
fraction of a penny, and had gone out into the world to seek his
fortune. But the fortune had been far to seek. For years he had
followed the sea; for years he had toiled on land; but in every
undertaking failure stalked him. Finally, at the age of fifty, he
touched success for the first time. He fell in love and found his
love returned. But here again the irony of fate was constant in its
pursuit. The object of his choice was the daughter of an artist, a
man as needy, as entirely unfortunate as he himself.

But love at fifty is sometimes as blind as love at twenty-five. With an
improvidence that belied his nationality, Alick Henderson married after