His face shadowed; Adelaide, glancing round for the cause, saw Simeon, half-sitting, half-standing in the doorway, humble apology on his weazened, whiskered face.  He looked so like her memory-picture of her grandfather that she burst out laughing.  “Don’t be hard on the poor old gentleman, father,” she cried.  “How can you resist that appeal?  Tell him to come in and make himself at home.”

As her father did not answer, she glanced at him.  He had not heard her; he was staring straight ahead with an expression of fathomless melancholy.  The smile faded from her face, from her heart, as the light fades before the oncoming shadow of night.  Presently he was absent-mindedly but tenderly stroking her hair, as if he were thinking of her so intensely that he had become unconscious of her physical presence.  The apparition of Simeon had set him to gathering in gloomy assembly a vast number of circumstances about his two children; each circumstance was so trivial in itself that by itself it seemed foolishly inconsequential; yet, in the mass, they bore upon his heart, upon his conscience, so heavily that his very shoulders stooped with the weight.  “Put your house in order,” the newcomer within him was solemnly warning; and Hiram was puzzling over his meaning, was dreading what that meaning might presently reveal itself to be.  “Put my house in order?” muttered Hiram, an inquiring echo of that voice within.

“What did you say, father?” asked Adelaide, timidly laying her hand on his arm.  Though she knew he was simple, she felt the vastness in him that was awe-inspiring—­just as a mountain or an ocean, a mere aggregation of simple matter, is in the total majestic and incomprehensible.  Beside him, the complex little individualities among her acquaintances seemed like the acrostics of a children’s puzzle column.

“Leave me with your brother awhile,” he said.

She glanced quickly, furtively at Arthur and admired his self-possession—­for she knew his heart must be heavier than her own.  She rose from her knees, laid her hand lingeringly, appealingly upon her father’s broad shoulder, then slowly left the room.  Simeon, forgotten, looked up at her and scratched his head; he turned in behind her, caught the edge of her skirt and bore it like a queen’s page.

The son watched the father, whose powerful features were set in an expression that seemed stern only because his eyes were hid, gazing steadily at the floor.  It was the father who broke the silence.  “What do you calculate to do—­now?”

“Tutor this summer and have another go at those exams in September.  I’ll have no trouble in rejoining my class.  I sailed just a little too close to the wind—­that’s all.”