“Very well, I sha’n’t need you again tonight.”  The Titan turned and climbed the stairs.

The lights of the music-room were burning brilliantly and on a table stood siphons and bottles and glasses.  At the door Hamilton paused and glanced uneasily about, then he saw Paul, and smiled.  Weary with his vigil Paul, the affectionate and faithful, had evidently fallen asleep in his chair.  Hamilton crossed and laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder.  Then as quickly he withdrew it.  Something unaccustomed in the younger man’s appearance arrested him and he stood gazing down.

The musician sprawled in an attitude of demoralized inertia and over his cameo face the dark hair hung disordered.  His hands fell grotesquely and his closed eyes were puffed.  Hamilton bent down and with a low oath studied his brother.  His sleep was no natural napping.  It was a drunken stupor proclaiming itself in a stertorous and uneasy breathing.

Angrily Hamilton shook the sagging shoulders until the sleeper’s lids opened heavily and the lips voiced some incoherent thing.  Then Paul attempted to turn his face away and go to sleep again.

“So,” exclaimed the elder as he dragged his brother to his feet and restored him to a semblance of consciousness, “so this is the way you waited for me?”

Paul blinked owlishly through the stupidity of his condition, and upon his delicate features the unaccustomed and swollen flush dwelt in a disfiguring blot.  He shook his head and informed thickly, “Jefferson Edwardes’s dead.”

“I know that—­and you’re drunk.”

The musician stupidly nodded his assent to so incontrovertible a statement and as he gradually awoke to a fuller realization, he rose and made his way unsteadily to the piano.  But his fingers were stiff and unresponsive, and after a brief effort he gave that up.

Once more he looked up and an expression of deep terror spread over his face.  Tears welled into his eyes and he wept for awhile in silence as Hamilton looked on.

“Jeff’son Edwardes’s dead,” he reiterated with parrot-like singleness of idea.  “Mary’s heart’s broke....  I’m drunk.”  One hand waved broadly in an oratorical gesture.  After a moment he added in solemn afterthought, “Father’s drunk, too.”

Hamilton ground his teeth.  “I suppose,” he said bitterly, “you regard the first two facts as justification for the others.”

Paul rose and through his condition something of his more normal self asserted itself.  He laid his hands on his brother’s shoulders.  “Hamilton, I think my heart’s broke, too.  Mary’s a sweet girl.  I haven’t slept f’r a long, long time—­been worrying—­an’ tonight I—­”

“Never mind explaining.”  Out of the elder brother’s voice the wrath had died.  “That won’t help now.  Come, I’ll put you to bed.”

As he turned away from Paul’s bedroom a half-hour later the face of Hamilton Burton was not the face of the conqueror.  In his own room he went to a window and looked out.  He saw a star and some fancy identified it as the same star that had caught his eye that night when he came back to the farm-house and found his father ill.  Once more it was not in the east riding toward the upper heavens, but in the west, setting beyond the Palisades of Jersey—­soon to drop from view.