r now--nothing but a kind of
dogged, perverse thankfulness that she should have had the way of life
she craved, without ever knowing the price he was about to pay for it.

In withdrawing his glance from hers he turned it about on the various
objects in the room. Many of them had stood in their places since before
he was born; others he had acquired at occasional sales of Guion
property, so that, as the different branches of the family became
extinct or disappeared, whatever could be called "ancestral" might have
a place at Tory Hill; others he had collected abroad. All of them, in
these moments of anguish--the five K'ang-hsi vases on the mantelpiece,
brought home by some seafaring Guion of Colonial days, the armorial
"Lowestoft" in the cabinets, the Copley portraits of remote connections
on the walls, the bits of Chippendale and Hepplewhite that had belonged
to the grandfather who built Tory Hill--all of them took on now a kind
of personality, as with living look and utterance. He had loved them and
been proud of them; and as he turned out the lights, leaving them to
darkness, eyes could not have been more appealing nor lips more eloquent
than they in their mute farewell.

Returning to the library, he busied himself with his main undertaking.
He was anxious that nothing should be left behind that could give Olivia
additional pain, while whatever she might care to have, her mother's
letters to himself or other family documents, might be ready to her
hand. It was the kind of detail to which he could easily give his
attention. He worked methodically and phlegmatically, steeling himself
to a grim suppression of regret. He was almost sorry to finish the task,
since it forced his mind to come again face to face with facts. The
clock struck two as he closed the last drawer and knew that that part of
his preparation was completed.

In reading the old letters with their echoes of old incidents, old joys,
old jokes, old days in Paris, Rome, or England, he had been so wafted
back to another time that on pushing in the drawer, which closed with a
certain click of finality, the realization of the present rolled back
on his soul with a curious effect of amazement. For a few minutes it was
as if he had never understood it, never thought of it, before. They were
going to make him, Henry Guion, a prisoner, a criminal, a convict! They
were going to clip his hair, and shave his beard, and dress him in a
hideous garb, and shut him in a c