n the rolled
arms of his chair. There was nothing in his appearance--nothing in his
worn, humorous face under the thin brown hair, to suggest the valiant
lover, the impressionable dreamer. Yet in the innermost truth of his own
nature he was both, and his grief, of which in his strange, almost
savage, reserve he had never spoken even to his wife, had softened
gradually into the gentlest of his dreams as well as the profoundest of
his regrets. "The little chap," as he always called the child, in his
thoughts, had grown for him into an individuality which for all its
nearness was yet clearly distinct from his own. Adams had lived day by
day with him, had sat face to face with him in his lamp-lighted room,
had carried him successfully through the first childish books that he
might have studied, had even launched him into the Latin he might have
learned. A boy to train, to educate, a mental companionship such as he
loved to fancy he would have found in a young, eager mind, had since his
marriage become the one burning desire of his heart, and even to-night
sitting, as he so often did, alone in his house, his thoughts dwelt with
a playful tenderness upon the boy who might have brought his _Caesar_ to
his footstool. He was a man of instinctive moral cleanness, and even in
his imagination he had always kept the riotous senses severely in the
check of reason. In the domain of the affections he had wanted nothing
desperately, he told himself, except his child; and so intense had this
yearning of fatherhood become in him that there were moments of bitter
loneliness when he seemed almost to feel the touch of the boy's hand
upon his knee. He had strange hours, even when his dream became more
vivid to him than the pressing reality of events.

The clicking of the latchkey as it was put into the lock aroused him
presently, and immediately afterward he heard the closing of the outer
door, a brief "Good-night!" in Connie's high-pitched voice, and her
rapid steps as they crossed the carpet in the hall. While he waited,
hesitating to follow her upstairs, his door opened and shut quickly, and
she came in and threw herself into a chair beside the lamp. Her blonde
head fell heavily back upon the cushions and the light, streaming
directly upon her face, revealed to his startled eyes all the intenser
angularities produced by the last twelve months--angularities which
seemed, somehow, to belong less to the features themselves than to the
restles