In withdrawing his glance from hers he turned it about on the various objects in the room.  Many of them had stood in their places since before he was born; others he had acquired at occasional sales of Guion property, so that, as the different branches of the family became extinct or disappeared, whatever could be called “ancestral” might have a place at Tory Hill; others he had collected abroad.  All of them, in these moments of anguish—­the five K’ang-hsi vases on the mantelpiece, brought home by some seafaring Guion of Colonial days, the armorial “Lowestoft” in the cabinets, the Copley portraits of remote connections on the walls, the bits of Chippendale and Hepplewhite that had belonged to the grandfather who built Tory Hill—­all of them took on now a kind of personality, as with living look and utterance.  He had loved them and been proud of them; and as he turned out the lights, leaving them to darkness, eyes could not have been more appealing nor lips more eloquent than they in their mute farewell.

Returning to the library, he busied himself with his main undertaking.  He was anxious that nothing should be left behind that could give Olivia additional pain, while whatever she might care to have, her mother’s letters to himself or other family documents, might be ready to her hand.  It was the kind of detail to which he could easily give his attention.  He worked methodically and phlegmatically, steeling himself to a grim suppression of regret.  He was almost sorry to finish the task, since it forced his mind to come again face to face with facts.  The clock struck two as he closed the last drawer and knew that that part of his preparation was completed.

In reading the old letters with their echoes of old incidents, old joys, old jokes, old days in Paris, Rome, or England, he had been so wafted back to another time that on pushing in the drawer, which closed with a certain click of finality, the realization of the present rolled back on his soul with a curious effect of amazement.  For a few minutes it was as if he had never understood it, never thought of it, before.  They were going to make him, Henry Guion, a prisoner, a criminal, a convict!  They were going to clip his hair, and shave his beard, and dress him in a hideous garb, and shut him in a cell!  They were going to give him degrading work to do and degrading rules to keep, and degrading associates to live with, as far as such existence could be called living with any one at all.  They were going to do this for year upon year, all the rest of his life, since he never could survive it.  He was to have nothing any more to come in between him and his own thoughts—­his thoughts of Olivia brought to disgrace, of the Clay heirs brought to want, of the Rodman heirs and the Compton heirs deprived of half their livelihood!  He had called it that evening the Strange Ride with Morrowby Jukes to the Land of the Living Dead, but it was to be worse than that.  It was to be worse than Macbeth with his visions of remorse; it was to be worse than Vathek with the flame burning in his heart; it was to be worse than Judas—­who at least could hang himself.