ompany to him, looked remote and uninteresting.

He fancied something cold and almost unfriendly in their expression, as
if they were staring through him or beyond him. They cared nothing for
his principles, his hopes, his disappointments, his successes; they
belonged to another world, in which he had no place. At this he felt a
vague resentment, a sense of discomfort that he could not have defined
or explained. He was used to being considered, respected, appreciated
at his full value in every region, even in that of his own dreams.

Presently he rang for the butler, telling him to close the house and
not to sit up, 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 he papers over listlessly. There was a description
and a picture of the "Weightman Wing of the Hospital for Cripples," of
which he was president;