The girl laughed too.  “Not unless you want to be haunted by his ghost.”

With a backward flashing glance, she went into the kitchen, and Van
Alen, lighting a cigarette, started to explore the old house.

Except for the wing, occupied by the caretaker, nothing had been disturbed since the family, seeking new fortunes in the city, had left the old homestead to decay among the desolate fields that yielded now a meagre living for Mrs. Brand and her four strapping sons.

In the old parlor, where the ancient furniture showed ghostlike shapes in the dimness, and the dead air was like a tomb, Van Alen found a picture of his great-grandfather.

The little man had been painted without flattery.  There he sat—­Lilliputian on the great charger!  At that moment Van Alen hated him—­that Hop-o’-my-Thumb of another age, founder of a pigmy race, who, by his braggart will, had that night brought upon this one of his descendants the scorn of a woman.

And even as he thought of her, she came in, with the yellow flare of a candle lighting her vivid face.

“I thought you might need a light,” she said; “it grows dark so soon.”

As he took the candle from her, he said abruptly:  “I shall not sleep in the canopy bed; there is a couch in the room.”

“Oh,” her tone was startled, “you shouldn’t have taken all that I said in earnest.”

“But you meant it?”

“In a way, yes.  I have been in here so often and have looked at your grandfather’s picture.  He was a great little man—­you can tell from his eyes—­they seem to speak at times.”

“To you?”

“Yes.  Of how he hated to be little, and how he triumphed when fame came at last.”

“I hate to be little—­”

It was the first time that he had ever owned it.  Even as a tiny boy he had brazened it out, boasting of his mental achievements and slurring the weakness of his stunted body.

“I know,” she had shut the kitchen door behind her, and they were standing in the hallway alone, “I know.  Every man must want to be big.”

She was only the girl who had waited on the table, but as she stood there, looking at him with luminous eyes, he burned with dull resentment, envying the blond boy who had sprawled at the head of the supper table.  After all, it was to such a man as Otto Brand that this woman would some day turn.

He spoke almost roughly:  “Size isn’t everything.”  She flushed.  “How rude you must think me,” she said; “but I have been so interested in dissecting your grandfather that I forgot—­you—­”

Van Alen was moved by an impulse that he could not control, a primitive impulse that was not in line with his usual repression.

“I am tempted to make you remember me,” he said slowly, and after that there was a startled silence.  And then she went away.

As he passed the sitting-room on his way up-stairs, he looked in, and spoke to Otto Brand.