ngly, and opening a door, entered the large room
it disclosed. This had been the dining-room. The walls were white,
in alternate panels with small oval mirrors whose dust-covered
surfaces looked like ground steel. At one end stood a crystal-knobbed
mahogany sideboard, holding glass candlesticks in the shape of
Ionic columns--above it a quaint portrait of a lady in hoops and
love-curls--and at the other end was a huge fireplace with rust-red
fire-dogs and tarnished brass fender. All these, with the round
centipede table and the Chippendale chairs set in order against the
walls, were dimmed and grayed with a thick powdering of dust.

The next room that he entered was big and wide, a place of dark colors,
nobly smutched of time. It had been at once library and living-room.
Glass-faced book-shelves ran along one side--well-stocked, as the dusty
panes showed--and a huge pigeonholed desk glowered in the big bow-window
that opened on to what had been the garden. On the wall hung an old map
of Virginia. At one side the dark wainscoting yawned to a cavernous
fireplace and inglenook with seats in black leather. By it stood a great
square tapestry screen, showing a hunting scene, set in a heavy frame.
A great leather settee was drawn near the desk and beside this stood a
reading-stand with a small china dog and a squat bronze lamp upon it.
In contrast to the orderly dining-room there was about this chamber a
sense of untouched disorder--a desk-drawer jerked half-open, a yellowed
newspaper torn across and flung into a corner, books tossed on desk and
lounge, and in the fireplace a little heap of whitened ashes in which
charred fragments told of letters and papers burned in haste. A bottle
that had once held brandy and a grimy goblet stood on the desk, and in
a metal ash-tray on the reading-stand lay a half-smoked cigar that
crumbled to dust in the intruder's fingers.

One by one Valiant forced open the tall French windows, till the fading
light lay softly over the austere dignity of the apartment. In that
somber room, he knew, had had place whatever was most worthy in the
lives of his forebears. The thought of generation upon generation had
steeped it in human association.

Suddenly he lifted his eyes. Above the desk hung a life-size portrait
of a man, in the high soft stock and velvet collar of half a century
before. The right eye, strangely, had been cut from the canvas. He stood
straight and tall, one hand holding an eager hou