p, and walked with lagging steps into the long library,
where the shaded lamps were burning. His eye fell upon the low shelves
full of costly books, but he had no desire to open them. Even the
carefully chosen pictures that hung above them seemed to have lost
their attraction. He paused for a moment before an idyll of Corot--a
dance of nymphs around some forgotten altar in a vaporous glade--and
looked at it curiously. There was something rapturous and serene about
the picture, a breath of spring-time in the misty trees, a harmony of
joy in the dancing figures, that wakened in him a feeling of half
pleasure and half envy. It represented something that he had never
known in his calculated, orderly life. He was dimly mistrustful of it.

"It is certainly very beautiful," he thought, "but it is distinctly
pagan; that altar is built to some heathen god. It does not fit into
the scheme of a Christian life. I doubt whether it is consistent with
the tone of my house. I will sell it this winter. It will bring three
or four times what I paid for it. That was a good purchase, a very
good bargain."

He dropped into the revolving chair before his big library table. It
was covered with pamphlets and reports of the various enterprises in
which he was interested. There was a pile of newspaper clippings in
which his name was mentioned with praise for his sustaining power as a
pillar of finance, for his judicious benevolence, for his support of
wise and prudent reform movements, for his discretion in making
permanent public gifts--"the Weightman Charities," one very
complaisant editor called them, as if they deserved classification as
a distinct species.

He turned the papers over listlessly. There was a description and a
picture of the "Weightman Wing of the Hospital for Cripples," of which
he was president; and an article on the new professor in the
"Weightman Chair of Political Jurisprudence" in Jackson University, of
which he was a trustee; and an illustrated account of the opening of
the "Weightman Grammar-School" at Dulwich-on-the-Sound, where he had
his legal residence for purposes of taxation.

This last was perhaps the most carefully planned of all the Weightman
Charities. He desired to win the confidence and support of his rural
neighbours. It had pleased him much when the local newspaper had
spoken of him as an ideal citizen and the logical candidate for the
Governorship of the State; but upon the whole it seemed to him wis