upon the estate of Burr and his mother.  Burr’s father had died some time before.  Lot was rumored to be harder, in the matter of exacting heavy interest, than his father had been.  It was said that Burr was far behind in his payments, and that Lot would foreclose.  Burr had a better head than his father’s, but he had terrible odds against him.  There was only one chance for his release from difficulty, people thought.  All the property, by a provision in the grandfather’s will, was to fall to him if Lot died unmarried.  Lot was twenty years older than Burr, and he coughed.

“Burr Gordon ain’t makin’ out much now,” people said; “the paint’s all off his house and his land’s run down, but there’s dead men’s shoes with gold buckles in the path ahead of him.”

Burr thought of it sometimes, although he turned his face from the thought, and Lot considered it when he took the mortgage note out of his desk and scored another installment of unpaid interest on it.  “If a man’s only his own debtor he won’t be very hard on himself,” he said aloud, and laughed.  Old Margaret Bean, his housekeeper, looked at him over her spectacles, but she did not know what he meant.  She prepared many a valuable remedy for his cough from herbs and roots, but Lot would never taste them, and she made her old husband swallow them all as preventatives of colds, that they should not be wasted.  Lot was coughing harder lately.  To-night, after he returned from the Hautvilles’, he had one paroxysm after another.  He did not go to bed, but huddled over the fire wrapped in a shawl, with a leather-bound book on his knees, all night, holding to his chest when he coughed, then turning to his book again.

When daylight was fully in the room he blew out the candle, and went over to the window and looked out across the road at the house opposite, which had always been called the “new house” to distinguish it from the old Gordon homestead.  It was not so solid and noble as the other, but it had sundry little touches of later times, which his father had always characterized as wasteful follies.  For one thing, it was elevated ostentatiously far above the road-level upon terraces surmounted by a flight of stone steps.  It fairly looked down, like any spirit of a younger age, upon the older house, which might have been regarded in a way as its progenitor.

The smoke was coming out of the kitchen chimney in the ell.  Lot Gordon looked across.  Burr was clearing the snow from the stone steps over the terraces.  There had never been any lack of energy and industry in Burr to account for his flagging fortunes.  He arose betimes every morning.  Lot, standing well behind the dimity curtain, watched him flinging the snow aside like spray, his handsome face glowing like a rose.

“I suppose he is going to the party at the tavern to-night,” Lot murmured.  Suddenly his face took on a piteous, wistful look like a woman’s; tears stood in his blue eyes.  He doubled over with a violent fit of coughing, then went back to his chair and his book.