These and kindred speculations kept him awake for a long time after the door had closed behind the ancient negro; and he was just dropping off into his first loss of consciousness when the familiar purring of a motor-car aroused him.  There was a window at his bed’s head, and he reached over and drew the curtain.  The view gave upon the avenue of cottonwoods and the circular carriage approach.  A touring-car, with its powerful head-lights paling the white radiance of the moon, was drawn up at the steps, and he had a glimpse of a big man, swathed from head to heel in a dust-coat, descending from the tonneau.

“I suppose that will be ‘Mahsteh Majah,’” he mused sleepily.  “That’s why the little lady was sitting up so late—­she was waiting for him.”  Then to the thronging queries threatening to return and keep him awake:  “Scat!—­go away! call it a pipe-dream and let me go to sleep!”

V

AT WARTRACE HALL

In his most imaginative moments, Evan Blount had never prefigured a home-coming to coincide in any detail of it with the reality.

When he opened his eyes on the morning following the night of singular adventures, the sun was shining brightly in at the bed’s-head window, a cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and his father, a little heavier, a little grayer, but with the same ruggedly strong face and kindly eyes, was standing at his bedside.

“Father!”—­and “Evan, boy!” were the simple words of greeting; but the mighty hand-grip which went with them was for the younger man a confirmation of the filial hope and a heart-warming promise for the future.  Following instantly, there came a rush of mingled emotions:  of astoundment that he had recognized no familiar landmark in the midnight faring through the hills or on the approach to the home of his childhood; of something akin to keen regret that the old had given place so thoroughly and completely to the new; of a feeling bordering on chagrin that he had been surprised into accepting the hospitable advances of a woman whom he had been intending to avoid, and for whom he had hitherto cherished—­and meant to cherish—­a settled aversion.

But at the hand-gripping moment there was no time for a nice weighing of emotions.  He was in his father’s house; the home-coming, some phases of which he had vaguely dreaded, was a fact accomplished, and the new life—­the life which must be lived without Patricia—­was fairly begun.  Also, there were many arrears to be brought up.

“Intuition, on the manward side of it at least, doesn’t go,” he was saying with half-boyish candor.  “I was awake last night when you drove home in the motor, and I looked out of the window and saw you as you came up the steps.  According to the psychics, there ought to have been some inward stirrings of recognition, but there weren’t—­not a single thrill.  Did the little—­er—­did Mrs. Blount tell you that I was here?”