itions which were as good as
anything America had to offer. Jeff was an aristocrat from skin to
heart, because he was sensitive, because he loved beauty and he didn't
want the other man to come too close; he didn't like tawdry ways to
press upon him. But while he had been shut into the seclusion of his own
thoughts, these past years, he had learned something. He had
strengthened passions that hardly knew they were alive until now events
awoke them. One was the worship of law, and one was that savage desire
of getting to the place where we love law so much that we welcome
punishment. He recalled himself from this dark journey back into his
cell, and threw up his head to the heavens and breathed in air. It was
the air of freedom. Yet it was only the freedom of the body. If he
forgot now the beauty of that austere goddess, the law, then was he more
a prisoner than when he had learned her face in loneliness and pain. He
walked out of the grounds and along the silent road, advised through
keen memory, by sounds and scents, of spots he had always known, and
went into the town and home. There were lights, but for all the sight of
people Addington might have been abed.

He opened the front door softly and out of the library Anne came at once
as if she had been awaiting him.

"Oh," she said, in a quick trouble breaking bounds, though gently, now
there was another to share it, "I'm afraid Farvie's sick."

XIV

"What is it?" said he. "What's the matter?"

But Anne, after a second glance at his tired face, was all concern for
him.

"Have you had something to eat?" she asked.

He put that aside, and said remindingly:

"What is it about father?"

Anne stood at the foot of the stairs. She had the air of defending the
way, lest he rush up before he was intelligently prepared.

"We don't know what it is. He went all to pieces. It was just after you
had gone. I found him there, shaking. He just said to me: 'I'll go to
bed.' So I helped him. That's all I know."

Jeff felt an instant and annoyed compunction. He had dashed off, to the
tune of his own wild mood, and left his father to the assaults of
emotions perhaps as overwhelming and with no young strength to meet
them.

"I'll go up," said he. "Did you call a doctor?"

"No. He wouldn't let me."

Jeff ran up the stairs and found Lydia in a chair outside the colonel's
door. She looked pathetically tired and anxious. And so young: if she
had arranged herself artful