The old Captain blew out a windy breath as he helped himself out of his coat in the empty library.  The bent globe still leaned against the window-seat.  The room had never looked so somber or so lonely.

At dinner the old man ate so little that Rose Hobbett ceased her monotonous grumbling to ask if he felt well.  He said he had had a hard day, a difficult day.  He felt so weak and thin that he foretold the gray days when he could no longer creep to the village and sit with his cronies at the livery-stable, when he would be house-fast, through endless days, creeping from room to room like a weak old rat in a huge empty house, finally to die in some disgusting fashion.  And Now Peter was going to leave him, was going to throw himself away on a lascivious wench.  A faint moisture dampened the old man’s withered eyes.  He drank an extra thimbleful of whisky to try to hearten himself.  Its bouquet filled the time-worn stateliness of the dining-room.

* * * * *

During the weeks of Peter’s stay at the manor it had grown to be the Captain’s habit really to write for two or three hours in the afternoon, and his pile of manuscript had thickened under his application.

The old man was writing a book called “Reminiscences of Peace and War.”  His book would form another unit of that extraordinary crop of personal reminiscences of the old South which flooded the presses of America during the decade of 1908-18.  During just that decade it seemed as if the aged men and women of the South suddenly realized that the generation who had lived through the picturesqueness and stateliness of the old slave regime was almost gone, and over their hearts swept a common impulse to commemorate, in the sunset of their own lives, its fading splendor and its vanished deeds.

On this particular afternoon the Captain settled himself to work, but his reminiscences did not get on.  He pinched a bit of floss from the nib of his pen and tried to swing into the period of which he was writing.  He read over a few pages of his copy as mental priming, but his thoughts remained flat and dull.  Indeed, his whole life, as he reviewed it in the waning afternoon, appeared empty and futile.  It seemed hardly worth while to go on.

The Captain had come to that point in his memoirs where the Republican representative from Knox County had set going the petard which had wrecked his political career.

From the very beginnings of his labors the old lawyer had looked forward to writing just this period of his life.  He meant to clear up his name once for all.  He meant to use invective, argument, testimony and a powerful emotional appeal, such as a country lawyer invariably attempts with a jury.

But now that he had arrived at the actual composition of his defense, he sat biting his penholder, with all the arguments he meant to advance slipped from his mind.  He could not recall the points of the proof.  He could not recall them with Peter Siner moving restlessly about the room, glancing through the window, unsettled, nervous, on the verge of eloping with a negress.