white doorways, white casements, white verandas, a white balustrade around the top, and a white urn at each of the four corners.  Where, as over the verandas, there was a bit of inclined roof, russet-red tiles gave a warmer touch of color.  From the borders of the lawn, edged with a line of shrubs, the town of Waverton, merging into Cambridge, just now a stretch of crimson-and-orange woodland, where gables, spires, and towers peeped above the trees, sloped gently to the ribbon of the Charles.  Far away, and dim in the morning haze, the roofed and steepled crest of Beacon Hill rose in successive ridges, to cast up from its highest point the gilded dome of the State House as culmination to the sky-line.  Guion looked long and hard, first at the house, then at the prospect.  He walked on only when he remembered that he must reserve his forces for the day’s possibilities, that he must not drain himself of emotion in advance.  If what he expected were to come to pass, the first essential to his playing the man at all would lie in his keeping cool.

So, on reaching his office, he brought all his knowledge of the world into play, to appear without undue self-consciousness before his stenographer, his bookkeeper, and his clerks.  The ordeal was the more severe because of his belief that they were conversant with the state of his affairs.  At least they knew enough to be sorry for him—­of that he was sure; though there was nothing on this particular morning to display the sympathy, unless it was the stenographer’s smile as he passed her in the anteroom, and the three small yellow chrysanthemums she had placed in a glass on his desk.  In the nods of greeting between him and the men there was, or there seemed to be, a studied effort to show nothing at all.

Once safely in his own office, he shut the door with a sense of relief in the seclusion.  It crossed his mind that he should feel something of the same sort when locked in the privacy of his cell after the hideous publicity of the trial.  From habit as well as from anxiety he went straight to a mirror and surveyed himself again.  Decidedly he had changed since yesterday.  It was not so much that he was older or more care-worn—­he was different.  Perhaps he was ill.  He felt well enough, except for being tired, desperately tired; but that could be accounted for by the way in which he had spent the night.  He noticed chiefly the ashy tint of his skin, the dullness of his eyes, and—­notwithstanding the fact that his clothes were of his usual fastidiousness—­a curious effect of being badly dressed more startling to him than pain.  He was careful to brush his beard and twist his long mustache into its usual upward, French-looking curve, so as to regain as much as possible the air of his old self, before seating himself at his desk to look over his correspondence.  There was a pile of letters, of which he read the addresses slowly without opening any of them.

What was the use?  He could do nothing.  He had come to the end.  He had exhausted all the possibilities of the situation.  Besides, his spirit was broken.  He could feel it.  Something snapped last night within him that would never be whole, never even be mended, again.  It was not only the material resources under his control that he had overtaxed, but the spring of energy within himself, leaving him no more power of resilience.