wned, were crossed two ancient swords. In the
middle of the room stood a heavy table, and pushed back, as though some
one had lately risen from it, was an armchair of Russian leather. Books
lay upon the table; one of them open, with a horn snuffbox keeping down
the leaf.

Haward seated himself in the great chair, and looked around him with a
thoughtful and melancholy smile. He could not clearly remember his mother.
The rings upon her fingers and her silvery laughter were all that dwelt in
his mind, and now only the sound of that merriment floated back to him and
lingered in the room. But his father had died upon that bed, and beside
the dead man, between the candles at the head and the candles at the foot,
he had sat the night through. The curtains were half drawn, and in their
shadow his imagination laid again that cold, inanimate form. Twelve years
ago! How young he had been that night, and how old he had thought himself
as he watched beside the dead, chilled by the cold of the crossed hands,
awed by the silence, half frighted by the shadows on the wall; now filled
with natural grief, now with surreptitious and shamefaced thoughts of his
changed estate,--yesterday son and dependent, to-day heir and master!
Twelve years! The sigh and the smile were not for the dead father, but for
his own dead youth, for the unjaded freshness of the morning, for the
world that had been, once upon a time.

Turning in his seat, his eyes fell upon the man who had followed him, and
who was now standing between the table and the door. "Well, friend?" he
demanded.

The man came a step or two nearer. His hat was in his hand, and his body
was obsequiously bent, but there was no discomposure in his lifeless voice
and manner. "I stayed to explain my presence in the house, sir," he said.
"I am a lover of reading, and, knowing my weakness, your overseer, who
keeps the keys of the house, has been so good as to let me, from time to
time, come here to this room to mingle in more delectable company than I
can choose without these walls. Your Honor doubtless remembers yonder
goodly assemblage?" He motioned with his hand toward a half-opened door,
showing a closet lined with well-filled bookshelves.

"I remember," replied Haward dryly. "So you come to my room alone at
night, and occupy yourself in reading? And when you are wearied you
refresh yourself with my wine?" As he spoke he clinked together the bottle
and glass that stood beside the books.