That fantastic illusion, as of one come, after adventures, to the kingdom of some Magus, was preserved to the Duke of Dorset by the days that followed. He was for the most part wholly alone. He arose early, and lived the long day in the open; in the evening he dined with his host, and sat with him in the great library until midnight. At no other time did he see this curious old man.

He was distinctly conscious of two moods, contrary and opposite, changing with the day and night, like one going alternately into and out of the illusions of an opiate. Under the sun, in the dreamy haze of Indian summer, this beautiful chÂteau of yellow stone, set about with exquisite gardens, rimmed in the smoky distance with an amphitheater of mountains, was the handiwork of fairies, reset by enchantment from an Arabian tale. But at night, in the presence of Cyrus Childers, that mood vanished, as when one passing behind the staged scenery of a play meets there the carpenter.

The days, one following like the other, were not wholly lacking in interest. The Duke of Dorset tramped about the estate, but more usually he shot quail over dogs in the river bottoms; he found this game bird smaller than the English quail, but hardy, strong winged, wild, getting up swiftly and sailing over long distances into the forest when alarmed. When the tramping tired him, he sat down under some tree by the river and watched the panting setters swim, their red coats spreading out like a golden fleece in the amber water. The servant at the chÂteau had provided him with a gun for this shooting, since he had brought with him only a rifle, and this remained in his dressing room, unopened, locked in the ordinary luggage box.

On one of these long tramps, he solved the riddle of the vague smoke pillar, rising above the mountains east of the chÂteau. He presently observed that the great road, leading from the coast over the wilderness to this country place, continued through the park, eastward from the turf court, crossed the river, and ascended the mountain. He followed the road for an entire morning to the summit; there the mystery of the dark wisp of cloud was revealed to him. Far inland, beyond the crest of this mountain, that smoke arose from great mills for the manufacture of lumber. From huge stacks, dimly to be seen, a line of thin smoke climbed skyward, twining into that faint blot—that sign, marked by the superstitious mountaineer.

That night after dinner the Duke of Dorset brought the conversation to this wisp of smoke, and diverging from the query, he got a flood of light on the career of Childers. The sinister vapor was commercial incense. Great mills for the manufacturing of the forests into lumber were gathered into that valley. It was one example of this man's policy of consolidation, his rooting up of competition everywhere in trade, a detail of his plan for gathering the varied sources of wealth compactly together. The ambition of the man presented itself as he warmed to the discussion. The motive, moving him here in this republic, was merely that moving Alexander in Asia—moving the Corsican in France. But the times had changed and the ancient plan was no longer adapted to the purpose; the seizure of authority by force was out of fashion; one must not provoke a revolt of the eye.

The Duke of Dorset, as he listened, was struck with an inconsistency. If the secret of this man's dominion lay in covering it from the eye, was not that secret out here? No Eastern despot was more magnificently housed. His host, for explanation, again pointed out that there was no native laborer on this whole estate. Every man, every woman to be seen was Japanese, brought directly over sea here to service. The whole estate inland was sentineled with keepers. Cut off thus from the republic, as though it were a foreign province, into which no man went without a passport, except, now and then, a mountaineer traveling through the forest, and, to add thus more to this isolation, the labor employed in the group of industries lying east of this estate were wholly Japanese—the jetsam of the Orient.

The old man, moving on this topic, spoke with a certain hesitation, and the Duke of Dorset understood why it was; after all, like every other despot, this man craved his gilded chair; pride clamored for authority made manifest, for the pomp of sovereignty, and he had yielded to that weakness, as the Corsican, in the end, had yielded to it, magnificently, in a riot of purple. But he saw clearer than the Corsican; he was not convinced, as that other of the Titans was; he sought cover—the deeps of the wilderness for the staging of his sovereignty.

Then, as this old man sketched in detail the first big conception of his estate, the care, the mammoth labor, the incredible sums expended, pride moved him; whatever thing of beauty any people in any land had made, he had made here; whatever thing of beauty they had treasured, he had bought with money. He had commanded, like that one looking up at Babylon, myriad human fingers, backs that strained, faces that sweated. And he told the story of it, striding through his library under its mellow light, in pride, like that barbarian king might have told the story of his city.

And in this library, beautiful as deft human fingers could make it, lighted softly from above, on its floor a treasure of India, where in colored threads an Eastern weaver had laboriously told the tale of a religion, occult and mystic, its domed ceiling covered with a canvas, painted by a Florentine, wherein the martyred dead winged upward at the last day; here—between mysteries, between, as it were, the oldest and the newest religion of the world, both disregarded, the sacred cloths of both, a spoil to profane decorative uses—the Duke of Dorset listened to this story. And, strangely, as he listened, the words of that curious priest, reading in the blood light, painfully by his fire, returned striding through his memory.

I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water: and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of hosts.... And owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.

And on his way up to his bedchamber at midnight, as though that ancient prophecy moved here to some sinister fulfillment, as though the sign of it fantastically preceded, the naiads, the fauns, and those bronze figures with their leering human faces and their goat loins, forming the exquisite frieze under the rail of the great stairway, seemed to follow, trooping at his heels.

But on every night, at the bend of this stairway, as he ascended, any mood, any fancy coming with him was exorcised out of his mind and replaced by another. Here, as he turned, by a trick of the canvas cunningly hung, by a trick of obscured lights cunningly descending, a woman seemed to meet him passing on this stair, going down like one who hurried. A woman, perhaps thirty, in the fantastic costume of some princess out of an ancient story, without a jewel on her body, as though the delicate pink skin, the exquisite full throat, the purple dark hair, despised a lesser glory.

It was not merely the beauty of this woman that stopped the Duke of Dorset coming up this stair at night, it was two fancies attending her that seized him. One that she wished to pass him swiftly, thus with her head bowed; because from some emotion held down within her, going to the very roots of life, she did not dare, she did not trust herself to look into his face. And the other that she was passing, going at this moment down the steps on which he stood, passing there at his elbow, now swiftly, out of the influence under which he held her—escaping for this life, for all time, forever. And, strangely, there attended on these two fancies a conviction, a truth established, that this woman, ten years older, was yet, somehow, Caroline Childers.

Every night as he came up the great turning staircase, he met her thus going down; and every night as he came, as his feet moved on the stair, the huge emotion, skulking within him, behind disguises, seized him and pointed to what he already desperately saw; that he could put out his hands ever so gently and she would stop; that he could speak her name ever so softly and she would come with a cry into his arms.

The impelling, moving, overwhelming power of this illusion lay in the conviction that this moment, here on the stair, now, was final—that for this moment only, the opportunity was in his hand. The next second, ticked off by the clock, she would be gone, and something like the door of death would swing to, clicking in its lock.

Every night, when he passed on up the stairway, when his foot came to the step which followed, a sense of loss, complete and utter, like the darkness of the pit, descended on him. Loss is a word too feeble. The thing was a sense of death. Somehow the one thing, the one only thing for which he was born and suckled and ate bread and became a man—a thing, hidden until now—had, in that moment, gone, stepped out into the light, and beckoned, and he had failed it. 'And so, now, the reason for his being here was ended; all the care, the patience, the endless labor of Nature, bringing him in strength to the fullness of his life, was barren; all the agony that he had given to his mother, the milk that he had drunk, the fruits of the earth that he had eaten, were wasted; he was now a thing of no account, useless to the great plan—a thing, to be broken up by the forces of Nature in disgust. The thing was more than a sense of death. It was a sense of extermination, merited by failure.

And further, his fathers, sleeping in the earth, seemed to approach and condemn him. The gift of life handed down to him must be passed on to another; it was a chain which, for great, mysterious, unknowable reasons, must continue, lest somehow the destiny of all was periled. Did he break it, then the labor of all was lost, the immortality of all endangered. Some doom, reaching equally to the farthest ancestor, some doom, not clear, not possible to get at, but sinister and threatening, attended the breaking of that chain. The emotion, clouding his blood, was an agent in the service of these dead men. These illusions, these fancies, were from them, doing what they could to move him. They had found one pleasing to them, one suited, one fit; they had led him by invisible influences to that one; they had prevailed in argument against him; they had colored and obscured his reason; they had lured him over four thousand miles of sea to that one whom they, wise with the wisdom of the dead, had chosen. And he had failed them! They pressed around him, their faces ghastly.

The man, do what he liked, could not escape from the dominion of this mood. He stopped every night on the stair; he came every night with a quicker pulse, and he passed on with that sense of desolation. The Duke of Dorset called reason and common sense to his aid, but neither could exorcise this fancy. That emotion, cunning past belief, in the service of the principle of life, had got him under its hypnotic fingers! He spoke calmly with himself; he made observations, verbally correct, arguments, to the ear sound, conclusions that no logic could assail; this was only a picture, as he had been told, of Caroline's mother painted in a fancy costume; and he a sentimentalist, but they availed him nothing.

In the morning, when he descended, there was only the full-length portrait of a beautiful woman hanging in its frame. The illusion attending it was gone, but not wholly gone; like some fairy influence, coming to men's houses in the night, and departing to solitudes at cock-crow, it awaited him outside—in the deep places of the forest, in the high grasses by the river, in the gardens when he sat alone on the benches in the sun.

If, after three hours of shooting, he sat down at the foot of a great tree to rest, some one came and stood behind it. If, desperately, he followed some lost trail of the red Indian, twining through the mountain, at every turn of it, some one barely escaped him, and the conviction grew upon him, like a madness, that at the next turn of the trail, if he went softly forward, he would find that one. Not the serious, beautiful woman of the picture, but truant hair, whipped by the wind, eyes that danced, a mouth, sweet and young, that laughed. And drugged with the oldest opiate, the Duke of Dorset stalked the oldest illusion in the world.

So ridden was he by this mood that the significance of an incident, which he otherwise would have marked, escaped him. In the last few days he had met, more than once, a Japanese who did not seem to be engaged in any particular labor. He met this man always in the mountains, east of the chÂteau, coming down toward it or returning; twice the Duke had seen him late in the evening, and once at midday, lying under a tree watching the chÂteau below him.

The man cringed when the Duke called to him, and replied, in excellent English, that he was a forester engaged on the estate.