a liveried boots holding the
mahogany door open for him at the head of the steps, and with an
expression that did not include 'Welcome!' among the many things that
it said.

The boots too plainly was sullen, the young lady in the office curt
and off-hand, the second and only waiter as nearly as possible
mutinous. 'All his blooming companions,' he explained (though not
precisely in these words), had departed to spend Christmas in the
bosom of their families. He spoke cockney English, and, in reply to
a question (for the colonel tried hard to draw him into conversation
and dissipate his gloom), confessed that he came from Brixton.

Further than this he would not go. In a mortuary silence, the
colonel, seated beneath a gasalier adorned (the mockery of it!) with
a sprig of mistletoe, sipped his half-pint of sherry, and ate his way
through three courses of a sufficiently good dinner. But better,
says Solomon, is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox
and hatred therewith.

Every time he raised his eyes they rested on the table at which he
had dined with his father on the eve of being entered at school.
The same table, the same heavy mahogany chairs--he recalled the
scroll pattern on their backs. He could see himself there in the
corner--a small boy, white in the face and weary with travel, divided
between surmise of the morrow and tears for the home left behind.
He could see his father seated there in profile, the iron-gray hair,
the remembered stoop. Well, they were all gone now--all, missing
whom that night he had come so near to breaking down and weeping.
. . . Mother, sisters, brother, gone one by one during the years of
his Indian exile, and himself now left the last of his race,
unmarried, and never likely to marry. Why had he come? To revisit
his old school? But the school would be closed for the Christmas
holidays, the children dispersed to their homes and happy.

Limen amabile
Matris et oscula . . .

He had ordered claret--a bottle of Lafitte, the best the house could
produce--and the waiter, impressed a little by the choice, now
appeared noiselessly, almost deferentially, at his elbow, and poured
out a first glassful of the wine.

'Waiter!'

'Yessir!'

'Where does that music come from?'--for the sound of an antiquated
piano had been thrumming for some minutes from a distant room.
The music was not ambitious--an old set of quadrille tunes.
The colonel did not recognise it.