“Confound the scamp!  He’s got some muscle,” he murmured.

Again his look went to the door.  Why didn’t the young fool come back and apologize?  How much longer did he mean to keep him waiting?

The minutes dragged away, and the silence of emptiness gathered and brooded in the great room and about the master of the house who sat within it, with bent head, waiting.

It was close upon ten o’clock when at length he rose and irritably rang the bell.

“See if you can find Master Piers!” he said to David.  “He can’t be far away.  Look in the drawing-room!  Look in the garden!  Tell him I want him!”

David withdrew upon the errand, and again the oppressive silence drew close.  For a long interval Sir Beverley sat quite motionless, still staring at the door as though he expected Piers to enter at any moment.  But when at length it opened, it was only to admit David once more.

“I’m sorry to say I can’t find Master Piers anywhere in the house or garden, Sir Beverley,” he said, looking straight before him and blinking vacantly at the lamp.  “I’m inclined to believe, sir, that he must have gone into the park.”

Sir Beverley snarled inarticulately and dismissed him.

During the hour that followed, he did not move from his chair, and scarcely changed his position.  But at last, as the stable-clock was tolling eleven, he rose stiffly and walked to the window.  It was fastened; he dragged at the catch with impatient fingers.

His face was haggard and grey as he finally thrust up the sash, and leaned out with his hands on the sill.

The night was very still all about him.  It might have been a night in June.  Only very far away a faint breeze was stirring, whispering furtively in the bare boughs of the elm trees that bordered the park.  Overhead the stars shone dimly behind a floating veil of mist, and from the garden sleeping at his feet there arose a faint, fugitive scent of violets.

The old man’s face contracted as at some sudden sense of pain as that scent reached his nostrils.  His mouth twitched with a curious tremor, and he covered it with his hand as though he feared some silent watcher in that sleeping world might see and mock his weakness.  That violet-bed beneath the window had been planted fifty years before at the whim of a woman.

“We must have a great many violets,” she had said.  “They are sweeter than all the roses in the world.  Next year I must have handfuls and handfuls of sweetness.”

And the next year the violets had bloomed in the chosen corner, but her hands had not gathered them.  And they had offered their magic ever since, year after year—­even as they offered it tonight—­to a heart that was too old and too broken to care.