race of
dust-dwellers with one wide, incomparably bloody gesture.

It was late when he found himself back again before the house, and an
ink-black cloud touched the moon's edge. After the airless evening a
wind had sprang up in the east; it thrashed among the lilac-stems as he
came through them and across the turf, silent-footed as an Indian. In
his right hand he had a bread-knife, held butt to thumb, dagger-wise.
Where he had come by the rust-bitten thing no one knows, least of all
himself. In the broken light his eyes shone with a curious luminosity of
their own, absorbed, introspective.

All the windows were dark, and the entrance-hall, when he slipped in
between the pillars, but across its floor he saw light thrown in a
yellow ribbon from the half-closed door of the drawing-room.

It took his attention, laid hands on his imagination. He began to
struggle against it.

He would _not_ go into that room. He was going to another room. To stay
him, he made a picture of the other room in his tumbled mind--the high,
bleak walls, the bureau with the three candles burning wanly, the bed,
the face of the man on the bed. And when his rebellious feet,
surrendering him up to the lure of that beckoning ribbon, had edged as
far as the door, and he had pushed it a little further ajar to get his
head in, he saw that the face itself was there in the drawing-room.

He stood there for some time, his shoulder pressed against the
door-jamb, his eyes blinking.

His slow attention moved from the face to the satin pillows that wedged
it in, and then to the woman that must have been his mother, kneeling
beside the casket with her arms crooked on the shining cover and her
head down between them. And across from her leaned "Ugo," the 'cello,
come down from his chamber to stand vigil at the other shoulder of the
dead.

The first thing that came into his groping mind was a bitter sense of
abandonment. The little core of candle-light hanging in the gloom left
him out. Its unstirring occupants, the woman, the 'cello, and the clay,
seemed sufficient to themselves. His mother had forgotten him. Even
"Ugo," that had grown part and parcel of his madness, had forgotten him.

Bruised, sullen, moved by some deep-lying instinct of the clan, his eyes
left them and sought the wall beyond, where there were those who would
not forget him, come what might, blood of his blood and mind of his own
queer mind. And there among the shadowed faces he searched