But all that had passed away.

Roger Gale was a rugged heavy man not quite sixty years of age.  His broad, massive features were already deeply furrowed, and there were two big flecks of white in his close-curling, grayish hair.  He lived in a narrow red brick house down on the lower west side of the town, in a neighborhood swiftly changing.  His wife was dead.  He had no sons, but three grown daughters, of whom the oldest, Edith, had been married many years.  Laura and Deborah lived at home, but they were both out this evening.  It was Friday, Edith’s evening, and as was her habit she had come from her apartment uptown to dine with her father and play chess.  In the living room, a cheerful place, with its lamp light and its shadows, its old-fashioned high-back chairs, its sofa, its book cases, its low marble mantel with the gilt mirror overhead, they sat at a small oval table in front of a quiet fire of coals.  And through the smoke of his cigar Roger watched his daughter.

Edith had four children, and was soon to have another.  A small demure woman of thirty-five, with light soft hair and clear blue eyes and limbs softly rounded, the contour of her features was full with approaching maternity, but there was a decided firmness in the lines about her little mouth.  As he watched her now, her father’s eyes, deep set and gray and with signs of long years of suffering in them, displayed a grave whimsical wistfulness.  For by the way she was playing the game he saw how old she thought him.  Her play was slow and absent-minded, and there came long periods when she did not make a move.  Then she would recall herself and look up with a little affectionate smile that showed she looked upon him as too heavy with his age to have noticed her small lapses.

He was grimly amused at her attitude, for he did not feel old at all.  With that whimsical hint of a smile which had grown to be a part of him, he tried various moves on the board to see how far he could go without interrupting her reveries.  He checkmated her, re-lit his cigar and waited until she should notice it.  And when she did not notice, gravely he moved back his queen and let the game continue.  How many hundreds of games, he thought, Edith must have played with him in the long years when his spirit was dead, for her now to take such chances.  Nearly every Friday evening for nearly sixteen years.

Before that, Judith his wife had been here.  It was then that the city had been young, for to Roger it had always seemed as though he were just beginning life.  Into its joys and sorrows too he had groped his way as most of us do, and had never penetrated deep.  But he had meant to, later on.  When in his busy city days distractions had arisen, always he had promised himself that sooner or later he would return to this interest or passion, for the world still lay before him with its enthralling interests, its beauties and its pleasures, its tasks and all its puzzles, intricate and baffling, all some day to be explored.