ized a family.

Indeed he had been a bad man, and yet she could not reconcile it all
with a wonderful something in him, a boldness, a sense of humour,
an everlasting energy, an electric power. She had never seen anyone
vitalize everything round him as John Grier had done. He threw things
from him like an exasperated giant; he drew things to him like an Angel
of the Covenant. To him life was less a problem than an experiment, and
this last act, this nameless repudiation of the laws of family life, was
like the sign of a chemist's activity. As she stood on the mountain-top
her breath suddenly came fast, and she caught her bosom with angry
hands.

"Carnac--poor Carnac!" she exclaimed.

What would the world say? There were those, perhaps, who thought Carnac
almost a ne'er-do-well, but they were of the commercial world where John
Grier had been supreme.

At the same moment, Carnac in the garden of his old home beheld the
river too and the great expanse of country, saw the grey light of
evening on the distant hills, and listened to Fabian who condoled with
him. When Fabian had gone, Carnac sat down on a bench and thought over
the whole thing. Carnac had no quarrel with his fate. When in the old
home on the hill he had heard the will, it had surprised him, but it had
not shocked him. He had looked to be the discarded heir, and he knew
it now without rebellion. He had never tried to smooth the path to that
financial security which his father could give. Yet now that disaster
had come, there was a glimmer of remorse, of revolt, because there was
some one besides himself who might think he had thrown away his chances.
He did not know that over on the mountain-side, vituperating the memory
of the dead man, Junia was angry only for Carnac's sake.

With the black storm of sudden death roaring in his ears, he had a sense
of freedom, almost of licence. Nothing that had been his father's was
now his own, or his mother's, except the land and house on which they
were. All the great business John Grier had built up was gone into the
hands of the usurper, a young, bold, pestilent, powerful, vigorous man.
It seemed suddenly horrible that the timber-yards and the woods and the
offices, and the buildings of John Grier's commercial business were not
under his own direction, or that of his mother, or brother. They
had ceased to be factors in the equation; they were 'non est' in the
postmortem history of John Grier. How immense a nerve the