For a long time John Valiant sat motionless, the opened letter in his hand, staring at nothing. He had the sensation, spiritually, of a traveler awakened with a rude shock amid wholly unfamiliar surroundings. He had passed through so many conflicting states of emotion that afternoon and evening that he felt numb.

He was trying to remember—to put two and two together. His father had been Southern-born; yes, he had known that. But he had known nothing whatever of his father’s early days, or of his forebears; since he had been old enough to wonder about such things, he had had no one to ask questions of. There had been no private papers or letters left for his adult perusal. It had been borne upon him very early that his father’s life had not been a happy one. He had seldom laughed, and his hair had been streaked with gray, yet when he died he had been but ten years older than the son was now.

Phrases of the letter ran through his mind: “Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court.... I can not tell you myself.” There was some tragedy, then, that had blighted the place, some “melancholy story,” as the clipping put it.

He bent over the deed spread out upon the table, following with his finger the long line of transfers: “‘To John Valyante,’” he muttered; “what odd spelling! ‘Robert Valyant’—without the ‘e.’ Here, in 1730, the ‘y’ begins to be ‘i.’” There was something strenuous and appealing in the long line of dates. “Valiant. Always a Valiant. How they held on to it! There’s never a break.”

A curious pride, new-born and self-conscious, was dawning in him. He was descended from ancestors who had been no weaklings. A Valiant had settled on those acres under a royal governor, before the old frontier fighting was over and the Indians had sullenly retired to the westward. The sons of those who had braved sea and savages had bowed their strong bodies and their stronger hearts to raze the forests and turn the primeval jungles into golden plantations. Except as regarded his father, Valiant had never known ancestral pride before. He had been proud of his strong and healthy frame, of his ability to ride like a dragoon, unconsciously, perhaps, a little proud of his wealth. But pride in the larger sense, reverence for the past based upon a respect for ancient lineage, he had never known until this moment.

Where was his facetious concept of Virginia now? He remembered his characterization of it with a wincing half-humorous mortification—a slender needle-prick of shame. The empty pretensions, subsisting on the vanished glories of the past, had suddenly acquired character and meaning. He himself was a Virginian.

There below him stretched the great caÑoned city, its avenues roaring with nightly gaiety, its roadways bright with the beams of shuttling motors, its theaters and cafÉs brilliant with women in throbbing hues and men in black and white, and its “Great White Way” blazing with incandescents, interminable and alluring—an apotheosis of fevered movement and hectic color. He knew suddenly that he was sick of it all: its jostle and glitter, its mad race after bubbles, its hideous under-surface contrasts of wealth and squalor, its lukewarm friendships and false standards which he had been so bitterly unlearning. He knew that, for all his self-pity, he was at heart full of a tired longing for wide uncrowded nature, for green breezy interludes and a sky of untainted sunlight or peaceful stars.

There stole into his mood an eery suggestion of intention. Why should the date assigned for that deed’s delivery have been the very day on which he had elected poverty? Here was a foreordination as pointed as the index-finger of a guide-post. “‘Every man carries his fate,’” he repeated, “‘on a riband about his neck.’ Chum, do you believe in fate?”

For answer the bulldog, cocking an alert eye on his master, discontinued his occupation—a conscientious if unsuccessful mastication of the flattish packet that had fallen from the folded deed—and with much solicitous tail-wagging, brought the sodden thing in his mouth and put it into the outstretched hand.

His master unrolled the pulpy wad and extricated the object it had enclosed—an old-fashioned iron door-key.

After a time Valiant thrust the key into his pocket, and rising, went to a trunk that lay against the wall. Searching in a portfolio, he took out a small old-fashioned photograph, much battered and soiled. It had been cut from a larger group and the name of the photographer had been erased from the back. He set it upright on the desk, and bending forward, looked long at the face it disclosed. It was the only picture he had ever possessed of his father.

He turned and looked into the glass above the dresser. The features were the same, eyes, brow, lips, and strong waving hair. But for its time-stains the photograph might have been one of himself, taken yesterday.

For an hour he sat in the bright light thinking, the pictured face propped on the desk before him, the dog snuggled against his knee.