why I've kept you from that which overcame your father. You are no
better, no stronger, than he was in the glory of his youth. But I have
barred the doors against the flaming dragon.

"I have no words eloquent enough to tell you of his care of me, his
consideration, his devotion. Yet nothing of all this helped in those
strange moods that came upon him. Then you were forgotten, I was
forgotten, the world was forgotten, and he let everything go--.

"I have kept what I have suffered to some extent from the world. If
people have pitied they have had the grace at least not to let me see.
The tragedy has been that you should have been sacrificed to it, your
youth shadowed. But what could I do? I felt that you must know, must
see, and I felt, too, that the salvation of the father might be
accomplished through the son.

"And so I let you go out into the night after him, I let you know that
which should, perhaps, have been hidden from you. But I loved him,
Derry--I loved you--I did the best I could for both of you.

"And now because of the past, I plead for the future. I want you to
stay with him, Derry. No matter what happens I beg that you will
stay--for the sake of the boy who was once like you, for the sake of
the man who held your mother always close to his heart, for the sake of
the mother who in Heaven holds you to your promise."


The great old house was very still. Somewhere in a shadowed room an
old man slept heavily with his servant sitting stiff and straight
beside him, at the head of the stairway a painted bride smiled in the