early to catch him asleep!"

A little later John Valiant, the bulldog at his heels, ascended the
steps of his club, where he lodged--he had disposed of his bachelor
apartment a fortnight ago. The cavernous seats of the lounge were all
occupied, but he did not pause as he strode through the hall. He took
the little pile of letters the boy handed him at the desk and went
slowly up the stairway.

He wandered into the deserted library and sat down, tossing the letters
on the magazine-littered table. He had suddenly remembered that it was
his twenty-fifth birthday.

In the reaction from the long strain he felt physically spent. He
thought of what he had done that afternoon with a sense of satisfaction.
A reversal of public judgment, in his own case, had not entered his
head. He knew his world--its comfortable faculty of forgetting, and
the multitude of sins that wealth may cover. To preserve at whatever
personal cost the one noble monument his father's genius had reared, and
to right the wrong that would cast its gloomy shadow on his name--this
had been his only thought. What he had done would have been done no
matter what the outcome of the investigation. But now, he told himself,
no one could say the act had been wrung from him. That, he fancied,
would have been his father's way.

Fancied--for his recollections of his father were vague and fragmentary.
They belonged wholly to his pinafore years. His early memories of his
mother were, for that matter, even more unsubstantial. They were of a
creature of wonderful dazzling gowns, and more wonderful shining jewels,
who lived for the most part in an over-sea city as far away as the
moon (he was later to identify this as Paris) and who, when she came
home--which was not often--took him driving in the park and gave him
chocolate macaroons. He had always held her in more or less awe and had
breathed easier when she had departed. She had died in Rome a year later
than his father. He had been left then without a near relative in the
world and his growing years had been an epic of nurses and caretakers, a
boys' school on the continent, and a university course at home. As far
as his father was concerned, he had had only his own childish
recollections.

He smiled--a slow smile of reminiscence--for there had come to him at
that moment the dearest of all those memories--a play of his childhood.

He saw himself seated on a low stool, watching a funny old clock with a
moon-face, wh