The boy stood, with blonde head lowered, silently turning over the leaves of an old magazine.

Marche walked out to the porch; his brows were bent slightly inward, and he bit the end of his unlighted cigarette until the thing became useless. Then he flung it away. A few stars watched him above the black ramparts of the pines; a gentle wind was abroad, bringing inland the restless voice of the sea.

In Marche's mind a persistent thought was groping in darkness, vainly striving to touch and awaken memories [Pg 102]of things forgotten. What was it he was trying to remember? What manner of episode, and how connected with this place, with the boy's book, with the portrait of his mother in its oval frame? Had he seen that portrait before? Perhaps he had seen it here, five years ago; yet that could not be, because Herold had not been here then.

[Pg 102]

Was it the writing on the flyleaf that had stirred some forgotten memory? It had seemed to him familiar, somehow—yet not like the handwriting in Herold's business letters to him. Yet it was Herold's writing—"Jim, from Daddy"—that was the inscription. And that inscription had riveted his attention from the first moment he saw it.

[Pg 103]Who was Herold? Who was this man whose undoubtable breeding and personal cultivation had stamped his children with the same unmistakable distinction?

[Pg 103]

Somehow or other there had been a great fall in the world for him—a terrible tumble from higher estate to land him here in this desolation of swamp-bound silence—here where only the dark pines broke the vast sky line, where the only sound was the far rumor of the sea. Sick, probably with coast fever, poor, dependent, no doubt, on the salary Marche paid him, isolated from all in the world that made the world endurable to intelligence, responsible for two growing children—one already a woman—what must be the [Pg 104]thoughts of such a man on a night like this, for instance?

[Pg 104]

"I want to see that man," he kept repeating to himself. "I want to see him; and I'm going to."

Restless, but now always listening for the sound of a light tread which he had come to know so well—alas!—he began to walk to and fro, with keen glances toward the illuminated kitchen window every time he passed it. Sometimes his mind was chaotic; sometimes clear. The emotions which had awakened in him within 

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