was too heavy.  He found it, took off his riding-coat and made a pillow for his head, then lay down full length upon the time-darkened wood.  He had lain so, often and often, a little boy, a larger boy, a long-limbed, brooding youth.  It had been his refuge from the fields, though hardly a refuge from his father.  Gideon had been always there, lounging in his chair on the other side of the hearth, black pipe in hand, heavy stick beside him, revolving in his slow-moving mind, there in the dusk after the day’s work, tobacco—­tobacco—­tobacco—­and how he should keep Lewis from learning.  “It had been better if he had succeeded,” said Rand aloud.

With Gideon still before his eyes he fell asleep.  Grim as was that figure, there was in the vision of it a strange sense of protection.  It was his father, and, giddy from want of sleep, he sank slowly into oblivion, much as before now he had travelled there in the other’s presence,—­travelled with a gloomy mind and a body sore from the latest beating.  Now the mind was full of scorpions, and the body stood in deadly need of sleep.  It took it with a strange reversion to long gone-by conditions.  The thought of Gideon’s stick, the feel of his heavy hand upon his shoulder, were with him as of yore.  The difference was that the man was comforted by what had been the boy’s leaden cross.

Exhausted as he was, he slept at first heavily, and without a dream.  This state lasted for some time, but eventually the brain took up its work, and the visions that plagued him recommenced.  He turned, flung out his arm, moaned once or twice, lay quiet, then presently gave a cry and started up, pale and trembling, the sweat upon his brow.  He wiped it off, drew a long, shuddering breath, and sat staring.

The kitchen windows were small, and half darkened by their wooden shutters.  While he slept, the day had rounded into an afternoon, with more of sunshine than the morning had contained.  The gold entered the room uncertainly, dimly, filtering in by the small apertures and striking across to the cavernous fireplace.

Rand knew it was but a trick of the light touching here and there in mote-filled shafts,—­a trick of the light aiding the vagaries of an overwrought brain.  He put forth his arm and found that it was so—­there was no chair there and no figure seated in the chair.  It was a trick of the light and an effect of imagination, an imagination that was hounded, day by day, from depth to pinnacle, from pinnacle to depth, back and forth like a shuttlecock in giant hands.  No chair was there and no seated figure.  He sank back on the settle and found that he saw them both.