The moon was now above the grove, and the yard was pied with deep shadows save where they lightened in the tender glow of outpouring candle light.  A crisp breeze from the river hinted at the possibility of frost when the night should have become older.  The grass at one side of the steps was specked with the white stubs of Grandemont’s cigarettes.  The cotton-broker’s clerk sat in his chair with the smoke spiralling above him.  I doubt that he once thought of the little fortune he had so impotently squandered.  Perhaps it was compensation enough for him to sit thus at Charleroi for a few retrieved hours.  Idly his mind wandered in and out many fanciful paths of memory.  He smiled to himself as a paraphrased line of Scripture strayed into his mind:  “A certain poor man made a feast.”

He heard the sound of Absalom coughing a note of summons.  Grandemont stirred.  This time he had not been asleep—­only drowsing.

“Nine o’clock, M’shi Grande,” said Absalom in the uninflected voice of a good servant who states a fact unqualified by personal opinion.

Grandemont rose to his feet.  In their time all the Charleses had been proven, and they were gallant losers.

“Serve dinner,” he said calmly.  And then he checked Absalom’s movement to obey, for something clicked the gate latch and was coming down the walk toward the house.  Something that shuffled its feet and muttered to itself as it came.  It stopped in the current of light at the foot of the steps and spake, in the universal whine of the gadding mendicant.

“Kind sir, could you spare a poor, hungry man, out of luck, a little to eat?  And to sleep in the corner of a shed?  For”—­the thing concluded, irrelevantly—­“I can sleep now.  There are no mountains to dance reels in the night; and the copper kettles are all scoured bright.  The iron band is still around my ankle, and a link, if it is your desire I should be chained.”

It set a foot upon the step and drew up the rags that hung upon the limb.  Above the distorted shoe, caked with the dust of a hundred leagues, they saw the link and the iron band.  The clothes of the tramp were wreaked to piebald tatters by sun and rain and wear.  A mat of brown, tangled hair and beard covered his head and face, out of which his eyes stared distractedly.  Grandemont noticed that he carried in one hand a white, square card.

“What is that?” he asked.

“I picked it up, sir, at the side of the road.”  The vagabond handed the card to Grandemont.  “Just a little to eat, sir.  A little parched corn, a tartilla, or a handful of beans.  Goat’s meat I cannot eat.  When I cut their throats they cry like children.”

Grandemont held up the card.  It was one of his own invitations to dinner.  No doubt some one had cast it away from a passing carriage after comparing it with the tenantless house of Charleroi.

“From the hedges and highways bid them come,” he said to himself, softly smiling.  And then to Absalom:  “Send Louis to me.”