and that all the past was forgotten and forgiven. And
now there was but one thought in his heart--love for all the world, one
overwhelming desire to take his place amongst them decently, worthily,
so that they might see that the wastrel of twenty years ago had
developed into a man, able to take his place, in due time, at the head
of the Trojan family. Oh! how he would try to please them all! how he
would watch and study and work so that that long twenty years' exile
might be forgotten both by himself and by them.

He bathed and dressed slowly by the fire. As he saw his clothes on the
bed he fancied, for a moment, that they might be a little worn, a
little old. They had seemed very good and smart in Auckland, but in
England it was rather different. He almost wished that he had stayed
in London for two days and been properly fitted by a tailor. But then
he had been so eager to arrive, he had not thought of clothes; his one
idea had been to rush down as soon as possible and see them all, and
the place, and the town.

Then he remembered that Clare had asked him to be quick. He finished
his dressing hurriedly, turned out the electric light, and left the
room.

He was pleased to find that he had not forgotten the turns and twists
of the house. He threaded the dark passages easily, humming a little
tune, and smelling that same sweet scent of dried rose leaves that he
had known so well when he was a small boy. He could see, in
imagination, the great white-and-pink china pot-pourri bowls standing
at the corner of the stairs--nothing was changed.

The blue drawing-room was deserted when he entered it--only the blaze
of the electric light, the golden flame of the log-fire in the great
open fireplace, and the solemn ticking of the gold clock that had stood
there, in the same place of honour, for the last hundred years. He
passed over to the windows and flung them open; the hum of the town
came, with the cold night air, into the room. The stars were brilliant
to-night and the golden haze of the lamplight hung over the streets
like a magic curtain. Ah! how good it was! The peace of it, the
comfort, the homeliness!

Above all, it was Cornwall--the lights of the herring fleet, the
distant rhythmical beat of the mining-stamps, that peculiar scent as of
precious spices coming with the wind of the sea, as though borne from
distant magical lands, all told him that he was, at last, again in
Cornwall.

He drank in the ni