The later night was very still and the moon, lifting like a paper lantern over the aspen tops, silvered all the landscape. In its placid radiance the white house loomed in a ghostly pallor. The windows of one side were blank, but behind the library shade the bulbous lamp still drowsed like a monster glow-worm. From the shadowy side of the building stretched a narrow L, its front covered by a rose-trellis, whose pale blossoms in the soft night air mingled their delicate fragrance with that of the jasmin.

Save for the one bright pane, there seemed now no life or movement in the house. But outside, in the moonlight, a lurching, shabbily-clothed figure moved, making his uncertain way with the deliberation of composed inebriety. The sash of the window was raised a few inches and he nodded sagely at the yellow shade.

"Gay old silver-top!" he hiccoughed; "see you in the morning!"

He capsized against an althea bush and shook his head with owlish gravity as he disentangled himself. Then he staggered serenely to the rose-trellis, and, choosing its angle with an assurance that betrayed ancient practice, climbed to the upper window, shot its bolt with a knife, and let himself in. He painstakingly closed both windows and inner blinds, before he turned on an electric light.

In the room in which he now stood he had stored his boyish treasures and shirked his maturer tasks. It should have had deeper human associations, too, for once, before the house had been enlarged to its present proportions, that chamber had been his mother's. The MarÉchal Niel rose that clambered to the window-sill had been planted by her hand. In that room he had been born. And in it had occurred that sharp, corrosive quarrel with his father on the night he had flung himself from the house vowing never to return.

As Hugh Stires stood looking about him, it seemed for an instant to his clouded senses that the past six months of wandering and unsavory adventure were a dream. There was his bed, with its clean linen sheets and soft pillows. How he would like to lie down just as he was and sleep a full round of the clock! Last night he had slept—where had he slept? He had forgotten for the moment. He looked longingly at the spotless coverlid. No; some one might appear, and it would not do to be seen in his present condition. It was scarcely ten. Time enough for that afterward.

He drew out the drawer of a chiffonier, opened a closet and gloated over the order and plenty of their contents. He made difficult selection from these, and, steadying his progress by wall and chair, opened the door of an adjoining bath-room. It contained a circular bath with a needle shower. Without removing his clothing, he climbed into this, balancing himself with an effort, found and turned the cold faucet, and let the icy water, chilled from artesian depths, trickle over him in a hundred stinging needle-points.

It was a very different figure that reËntered the larger room a half-hour later, from the slinking mud-lark that had climbed the rose-trellis. The old Hugh lay, a heap of soiled and sodden garments; the new stood forth shaven, fragrant with fresh linen and clean and fit apparel. The maudlin had vanished, the gaze was unvexed and bright, the whole man seemed to have settled into himself, to have grown trim, nonchalant, debonair. He held up his hand, palm outward, between the electric globe and his eye—there was not a tremor of nerve or muscle. He smiled. No headache, no fever, no uncertain feet or trembling hands or swollen tongue, after more than a week of deep potations. He could still "sober-up" as he used to do (with Blake the butler to help him) when it had been a mere matter of an evening's tipsiness! And how fine it felt to be decently clad again!

He crossed to a cheval-glass. The dark handsome face that looked out at him was clean-cut and aristocratic, perfect save for one blemish—a pale line that slanted across the right brow, a birth-mark, resembling a scar. All his life this mark had been an eyesore to its owner. It had a trick of turning an evil red under the stress of anger or emotion.

On the features, young and vigorous as they were, subtle lines of self-indulgence had already set themselves, and beneath their expression, cavalier and caressing, lay the unmistakable stigmata of inherited weakness. But these the gazer did not see. He regarded himself with egotistic complacency. Here he was, just as sound as ever. He had had his fling, and taught "the Governor" that he could get along well enough without any paternal help if he chose. Needs must when the devil drives, but his father should never guess the coarse and desperate expediences that had sickened him of his bargain, or the stringent calculation of his return. He was no milksop, either, to come sneaking to him with his hat in his hand. When he saw him now, he would be dressed as the gentleman he was!

He attentively surveyed the room. It was clean and dusted—evidently it had been carefully tended. He might have stepped out of it yesterday. There in a corner was his banjo. On the edge of a silver tray was a half-consumed cigar. It crumbled between his fingers. He had been smoking that cigar when his father had entered the room on that last night. There, too, was the deck of cards he had angrily flung on to the table when he left. Not a thing had been disturbed—yes, one thing. His portrait, that had hung over his bed, was not in its place. A momentary sense of trepidation rushed through him. Could his father really have meant all he had said in his rage? Did he really mean to disown him?

For an instant he faced the hall door with clenched hands. Somewhere in the house, unconscious of his presence, was that ward of whose coming he had learned. Moreau was a good friend to have warned him! Was she part of a plan of reprisal—her presence there a tentative threat to him? Could his father mean to adopt her? Might that great house, those grounds, the bulk of his wealth, go to her, and he, the son, be left in the cold? He shivered. Perhaps he had stayed away too long!

As he turned again, he heard a sound in the hall. He listened. A light step was approaching—the swish of a gown. With a sudden impulse he stepped into the embrasure of the window, as the figure of a girl paused at the door. He felt his face flush; she had thrown a crimson kimono over her white night-gown, and the apparition seemed to part the dusk of the doorway like the red breast of a robin. She held in her hands a bunch of the pale MarÉchal Niel roses, and his eye caught the long rebellious sweep of her bronze hair, and the rosy tint of bare feet through the worsted meshes of her night-slippers.

To his wonder the sight of the lighted room seemed to cause her no surprise. For an instant she stood still as though listening, then entered and placed the roses in a vase on a reading-stand by the bedside.

Hugh gasped. To reach the stand the girl had passed the spot where he stood, but she had taken no note of him. Her gaze had gone by him as if he had been empty air. Then he realized the truth; Jessica Holme was blind! Moreau's letter had given him no inkling of that. So this was the girl with whom his father now threatened him! Was she counting on his not coming back, waiting for the windfall? She was blind—but she was beautiful! Suppose he were to turn the tables on the old man, not only climb back into his good graces through her, but even—

The thin line on his brow sprang suddenly scarlet. What a supple, graceful arm she had! How adroit her fingers as they arranged the rose-stems! Was he already wholly blackened in her opinion? What did she think of him? Why did she bring those flowers to that empty room? Could it have been she who had kept it clean and fresh and unaltered against his return? A confident, daring look grew in his eyes; he wished she could see him in that purple tie and velvet smoking-jacket! What an opportunity for a romantic self-justification! Should he speak? Suppose it should frighten her?

Chance answered him. His respiration had conveyed to her the knowledge of a presence in the room. He heard her draw a quick breath. "Some one is here!" she whispered.

He started forward. "Wait! wait!" he said in a loud whisper, as she sprang back. But the voice seemed to startle her the more, and before he could reach her side she was gone. He heard her flying steps descend the stair, and the opening and closing of a door.

The sudden flight jarred Hugh's pleasurable sense of novelty. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets. Now he was in for it! She would alarm the house, rouse the servants—he should have a staring, domestic audience for the imminent reconciliation his sobered sense told him was so necessary. Why could he not slip back into the old rut, he thought sullenly, without such a boring, perfunctory ceremony? He had intended to postpone this, if possible, until a night's sleep had fortified him. But now the sooner the ordeal was over, the better! Shrugging his shoulders, he went quickly down the stair to the library.

He had known exactly what he should see there—the vivid girl with the hue of fright in her cheeks, the shaded lamp, the wheel-chair, and the feeble old man with his furrowed face and gray mustaches. What he himself should say he had not had time to reflect.

The figure in the chair looked up as the door opened. "Hugh!" he cried, and half lifted himself from his seat. Then he settled back, and the sunken, indomitable eyes fastened themselves on his son's face.

Hugh was melodramatic—cheaply so. He saw the girl start at the name, saw her hands catch at the kimono to draw its folds over the bare white throat, saw the rich color that flooded her brow. He saw himself suddenly the moving hero of the stagery, the tractive force of the situation. Real tears came to his eyes—tears of insincere feeling, due partly to the cheap whisky he had drunk that day, whose outward consequences he had so drastically banished, and partly to sheer nervous excitation.

"Father!" he said, and came and caught the gaunt hand that shook against the chair.

Then the deeps of the old man's heart were suddenly broken up. "My son!" he cried, and threw his arms about him. "Hugh—my boy, my boy!"

Jessica waited to hear no more. Thrilling with gladness, and flushing with the sudden recollection of her bare throat and feet, she slipped away to her room to creep into bed and lie wide-eyed and thinking.

What did he look like? Of his face she had never seen even a counterfeit presentment. Through what adventures had he passed? Now that he had come home, forgiving and forgiven, would he stay? He had been in his room when she entered it with the roses—must have guessed, if he had not already known, that she was blind. Would he guess that she had cared for that room, had placed fresh flowers there often and often?

Since she had come to the house in the aspens Jessica had found the imagined figure of Hugh a dominant presence in a horizon lightened with a throng of new impressions. The direful catastrophe of her blindness—it had been the sudden result of an accident—had fallen like a thunderbolt upon a nature elastic and joyous. It had brought her face to face with a revelation of mental agony, made her feel herself the hapless martyr of that curt thing called Chance; one moment seeing a universe unfolding before her in line and hue, the next feeling it thrust rudely behind a gruesome blank of darkness. The two years that followed had been a period when despair had covered her; when specialists had peered with cunning instruments into her darkened eyes, to utter hopeful platitudes—and to counsel not at all. Then into her own painful self-absorption had intruded her father's death, and the very hurt of this, perhaps, had been a salving one. It had of necessity changed her whole course of living. In her new surroundings she had taken up life once more. Her alert imagination had begun to stir, to turn diffidently to new channels of exploration and interest. She had always lived largely in books and pictures, and her world was still full of ideals and of brave adventures. Gratitude had made her love the morose old invalid with his crabbed tempers; and the wandering son, choosing for pride's sake a resourceless battle with the world—the very mystery of his whereabouts—had taken strong hold of her imagination. Of the quarrel which had preceded Hugh's departure, she had made her own version. That he should have come back on this very night, when the disinheritance she had dreaded had been so nearly consummated, seemed now to have an especial and an appealing significance.

Presently she rose, slipped on the red kimono, and, taking a key from the pocket of her gown, stole from the room. She ascended a stairway and unlocked the door of a wide, bare attic where the moonlight poured through a skylight in the roof upon an unfinished statue. In this statue she had begun to fashion, in the imagined figure of Hugh, her conception of the Prodigal Son; not the battered and husk-filled wayfarer of the parable, but a figure of character and pathos, erring through youthful pride and spirit. The unfinished clay no eyes had seen, for those walls bounded her especial domain.

Carefully, one by one, she unwound the wet cloths that swathed the figure. In the streaming radiance of the night, the clay looked white as snow and she a crimson ghost. She passed her fingers lightly over the features. Was the real Hugh's face like that? One day, perhaps, her own eyes would tell her, and she would finish it. Then she might show it to him, but not now.

She replaced the coverings, relocked the door, and went softly down to her bed.

When Hugh went shamefacedly up the stair from the library, the artificial glow that had tingled to his finger-tips had faded. The poise of mind, the certitude of all the faculties of eye and hand that his icy bath had given him, were yielding. The penalties he had dislodged were returning reinforced. He was rapidly becoming drunk.

He groped his way to his room, turned out the light, threw himself fully dressed upon the bed, and slept the deep sleep of deferred intoxication.