At this juncture Colonel Harbison, followed by his nephew and Gilmore, made his way through the crowd before the door.  Gilmore, even, gave an involuntary shudder as they entered the small hall lighted by the single lantern, while the colonel could have wished himself anywhere else; he had come from a sense of duty; he had known McBride as well as any one in Mount Hope had known him, and it had seemed a lack of respect to the dead man to leave him to the care of the merely curious; but he was painfully conscious of the still presence in the parlor; he felt that they were unwelcome intruders in the home of that austere old man, who had made no friends, who had no intimates, but had lived according to his choice, solitary and alone.  The colonel and Watt Harbison followed the gambler into what had been the old merchant’s sitting-room.  There were two lamps on the chimneypiece, both of which Gilmore lighted.

“That’s a whole lot better,” he said.

“Anything more we can do, gentlemen?” asked the undertaker, coming into the room.

“Nothing, thank you,” answered the colonel in a tone of abstraction, and he felt a sense of relief when the officials had gone their way into the night, leaving him and his two companions to their vigil.

Now for the first time they had leisure and opportunity to look about them.  It was a poor enough place, all things considered; the furniture was dingy with age and neglect, for Archibald McBride had kept no servant; a worn and faded carpet covered the floor; there was an engraving of Washington Crossing the Delaware and a few old-fashioned woodcuts on the wall; at one side of the room was a desk, opposite it a rusted sheet-iron stove in which Watt Harbison was already starting a fire; there was a scant assortment of uncomfortable chairs, a table, with one leg bandaged, and near the desk an old mahogany davenport.

“This wouldn’t have suited you, eh, Colonel?” said Gilmore at last.

“He could hardly be said to live here, he merely came here to sleep,” answered the colonel.

“No, he couldn’t have cared for anything but the one thing,” said Gilmore.  “Were you ever here before, Colonel?” he added.

“Never.”

“I don’t suppose half a dozen people in the town were ever inside his door until to-night,” said Watt Harbison, speaking for the first time.

Gilmore turned to look at the colonel’s nephew as if he had only that moment become aware of his presence.  What he saw did not impress him greatly, for young Watt, save for an unusually large head, was much like other young men of his class.  His speech was soft, his face beardless and his gray eyes gazed steadily but without curiosity on, what was for him, an uncliented world.  For the eighteen months that he had been an “attorney and counselor at law” the detail of office rent had been taken care of by the colonel.

“Sort of makes the game he played seem rotten poor sport,” commented Gilmore, replying to the nephew but looking at the uncle.