sitting, as he so often did, alone in his house, his thoughts dwelt with
a playful tenderness upon the boy who might have brought his _Cæsar_ to
his footstool. He was a man of instinctive moral cleanness, and even in
his imagination he had always kept the riotous senses severely in the
check of reason. In the domain of the affections he had wanted nothing
desperately, he told himself, except his child; and so intense had this
yearning of fatherhood become in him that there were moments of bitter
loneliness when he seemed almost to feel the touch of the boy's hand
upon his knee. He had strange hours, even when his dream became more
vivid to him than the pressing reality of events.

The clicking of the latchkey as it was put into the lock aroused him
presently, and immediately afterward he heard the closing of the outer
door, a brief "Good-night!" in Connie's high-pitched voice, and her
rapid steps as they crossed the carpet in the hall. While he waited,
hesitating to follow her upstairs, his door opened and shut quickly, and
she came in and threw herself into a chair beside the lamp. Her blonde
head fell heavily back upon the cushions and the light, streaming
directly upon her face, revealed to his startled eyes all the intenser
angularities produced by the last twelve months--angularities which
seemed, somehow, to belong less to the features themselves than to the
restless intelligence which lay behind them. Connie's features had
always appeared too small for expression; too correctly formed for any
deviating individuality, but the impression made upon Adams now was that
they had grown so thin--so transparent in their fineness--that he looked
through them to the nervous animation confined and struggling in her
fragile body. The same animation throbbed like a pulse in her emaciated
bosom, which only the extreme smallness of her bones kept still lovely
in its low-cut evening gown. She was devoured, consumed by the agony of
restlessness which shook through her, directing and controlling her