Sitting there under the green lamp, he himself showed as an insignificant figure to possess an ear for the divine silences, an eye for the invisible beauty.  His long, gaunt body lay relaxed and inert upon the leather cushions, and his knotted, bony hands—­the hands of a scholar and a thinker—­were stretched, palms downward, on the rolled arms of his chair.  There was nothing in his appearance—­nothing in his worn, humorous face under the thin brown hair, to suggest the valiant lover, the impressionable dreamer.  Yet in the innermost truth of his own nature he was both, and his grief, of which in his strange, almost savage, reserve he had never spoken even to his wife, had softened gradually into the gentlest of his dreams as well as the profoundest of his regrets.  “The little chap,” as he always called the child, in his thoughts, had grown for him into an individuality which for all its nearness was yet clearly distinct from his own.  Adams had lived day by day with him, had sat face to face with him in his lamp-lighted room, had carried him successfully through the first childish books that he might have studied, had even launched him into the Latin he might have learned.  A boy to train, to educate, a mental companionship such as he loved to fancy he would have found in a young, eager mind, had since his marriage become the one burning desire of his heart, and even to-night sitting, as he so often did, alone in his house, his thoughts dwelt with a playful tenderness upon the boy who might have brought his Caesar to his footstool.  He was a man of instinctive moral cleanness, and even in his imagination he had always kept the riotous senses severely in the check of reason.  In the domain of the affections he had wanted nothing desperately, he told himself, except his child; and so intense had this yearning of fatherhood become in him that there were moments of bitter loneliness when he seemed almost to feel the touch of the boy’s hand upon his knee.  He had strange hours, even when his dream became more vivid to him than the pressing reality of events.

The clicking of the latchkey as it was put into the lock aroused him presently, and immediately afterward he heard the closing of the outer door, a brief “Good-night!” in Connie’s high-pitched voice, and her rapid steps as they crossed the carpet in the hall.  While he waited, hesitating to follow her upstairs, his door opened and shut quickly, and she came in and threw herself into a chair beside the lamp.  Her blonde head fell heavily back upon the cushions and the light, streaming directly upon her face, revealed to his startled eyes all the intenser angularities produced by the last twelve months—­angularities which seemed, somehow, to belong less to the features themselves than to the restless intelligence which lay behind them.  Connie’s features had always appeared too small for expression; too correctly formed for any deviating individuality, but the impression made upon Adams now was that they had grown so thin—­so