his hand fastened on latch or door-knob with perfect precision. He came
at last into a large hallway flooded by the moon, pale, watchful, his
beard frosted by the light. In the stillness of his tread and the
composed sorrow of his face he seemed like one long dead who "revisits
the glimpses of the moon."

At last he entered a room the door of which stood wide open. In this
room had been begotten, or had had exercise, whatever of him was worth
approving in the days before he died. It was a place of books and
statues and tapestry, and the dark oak was nobly smutched of Time. This
sombre oaken wall had been handed down through four generations from the
man's great-grandfather: the breath of generations had steeped it in
human association.

Entering, he turned for an instant with clinched hands to look at another
door across the hall. Behind that door were two people who despised his
memory, who conspired to forget his very name. This house was the
woman's, for he had given it to her the day he died. But that she could
live there with all the old associations, with memories that, however
bitter, however shaming, had a sort of sacredness, struck into his soul
with a harrowing pain. There she was whom he had spared--himself; whose
happiness had lain in his hands, and he had given it to her. Yet her
very existence robbed himself of happiness, and made sorrowful a life
dearer than his own.

Kathleen lay asleep in that room--he fancied he could hear her breathing;
and, by the hospital on the hill, up beyond the point of pines, in a
little cottage which he could see from the great window, lay Rosalie with
sleepless eyes and wan cheeks, longing for morning and the stir of life
to help her to forget.