He mounted the stairs slowly, the weight of his tread creaking the polished wood.  Before the threshold of the judge’s room again he hesitated, his hand upraised.  The house was so still that it seemed to be untenanted, and he shivered suddenly, as if the wind that rustled the dried grasses were a ghostly footstep.  Then, as he glanced back down the wide old stairway, his own childhood looked up, at him—­an alien figure, half frightened by the silence.

As he stood there the door opened noiselessly, and the doctor came out, peering with shortsighted eyes over his lowered glasses.  When he ran against Nicholas he coughed uncertainly and drew back.  “Well, well, if it isn’t the governor!” he said.  “We have been looking for Tom—­but our friend the judge is better—­much better.  I tell him he’ll live yet to see us buried.”

A load passed suddenly from Nicholas’s mind.  The ravaged face of the old doctor—­with its wrinkled forehead and its almost invisible eyes—­became at once the mask of a good angel.  He grasped the outstretched hand and crossed the threshold.

The judge was lying among the pillows of his bed, his eyes closed, his great head motionless.  There was a bowl of yellow chrysanthemums on a table beside him, and near it Mrs. Burwell was measuring dark drops into a wineglass.  She looked up with a smile of welcome that cast a cheerful light about the room.  Her smile and the colour of the chrysanthemums were in Nicholas’s eyes as he went to the bed and laid his hand upon the still fingers that clasped the counterpane.

The judge looked at him with a wavering recognition.  “Ah, it is you, Tom,” he said, and there was a yearning in his voice that fell like a gulf between him and the man who was not his son.  At the moment it came to Nicholas with a great bitterness that his share of the judge’s heart was the share of an outsider—­the crumbs that fall to the beggar that waits beside the gate.  When the soul has entered the depths and looks back again it is the face of its own kindred that it craves—­the responsive throbbing of its own blood in another’s veins.  This was Tom’s place, not his.

He leaned nearer, speaking in an expressionless voice.  “It’s I, sir—­Nicholas—­Nicholas Burr.”

“Yes, Nicholas,” repeated the judge doubtfully; “yes, I remember, what does he want?  Amos Burr’s son—­we must give him a chance.”

For a moment he wandered on; then his memory returned in uncertain pauses.  He looked again at the younger man, his sight grown stronger.  “Why, Nicholas, my dear boy, this is good of you,” he exclaimed.  “I had a fall—­a slight fall of no consequence.  I shall be all right if Caesar will let me fast a while.  Caesar’s getting old, I fear, he moves so slowly.”

He was silent, and Nicholas, sitting beside the bed, kept his eyes on the delicate features that were the lingering survival of a lost type.  The splendid breadth of the brow, the classic nose, the firm, thin lips, and the shaven chin—­these were all downstairs on faded canvases, magnificent over lace ruffles, or severe above folded stocks.  Over the pillows the chrysanthemums shed a golden light that mingled in his mind with the warm brightness of Mrs. Burwell’s smile—­giving the room the festive glimmer of an autumn garden.