irst, for
his mother.

When he entered the House on the Hill, he had a sudden shiver. Somehow,
the room where his mother had sat for so many years, and where he had
last seen his father, John Grier, had a coldness of the tomb. There was
a letter on the centre table standing against the lamp. He saw it was in
his mother's handwriting, and addressed to himself.

He tore it open, and began to read. Presently his cheeks turned pale.
More than once he put it down, for it seemed impossible to go on, but
with courage he took it up again and read on to the end.

"God--God in Heaven!" he broke out when he had finished it. For a long
time he walked the floor, trembling in body and shaking in spirit. "Now
I understand everything," he said at last aloud in a husky tone. "Now I
see what I could not see--ah yes, I see at last!"

For another time of silence and turmoil he paced the floor, then he
stopped short. "I'm glad they both are dead," he said wearily. Thinking
of Barode Barouche, he had a great bitterness. "To treat any woman
so--how glad I am I fought him! He learned that such vile acts come home
at last."

Then he thought of John Grier. "I loathed him and loved him always," he
said with terrible remorse in his tone. "He used my mother badly, and
yet he was himself; he was the soul that he was born, a genius in his
own way, a neglecter of all that makes life beautiful--and yet himself,
always himself. He never pottered. He was real--a pirate, a plunderer,
but he was real. And he cared for me, and would have had me in the
business if he could. Perhaps John Grier knows the truth now!... I hope
he does. For, if he does, he'll see that I was not to blame for what
I did, that it was Fate behind me. He was a big man, and if I'd worked
with him, we'd have done big things, bigger than he did, and that was
big enough."

"Do nothing till you see me," his mother had written in a postscript to
her letter, and, with a moroseness at his heart and scorn of Barouche at
his lips, he went slowly up to his mother's room. At her door he paused.
But the woman was his mother, and it must be faced. After all, she had
kept faith ever since he was born. He believed that. She had been an
honest wife ever since that fatal summer twenty-seven years before.

"She has suffered," he said, and knocked at her door. An instant later
he was inside the room. There was only a dim light, but his mother was
sitting up in her bed, a gaunt and yet beautiful,