The great house had given to the General’s wife her proper setting.  She had trailed her satins and silks up and down the marble stairway.  Her slender hands, heavy with their rings, had rested on its balustrade, its mirrors had reflected the diamond tiara with which the General had crowned her.  In the vast drawing room, the gold and jade and ivory treasures in the cabinets had seemed none too fine for this greatest treasure of them all.  In the dining room the priceless porcelains had been cheapened by her greater worth.  The General had travelled far and wide, and he had brought the wealth of the world to lay at the feet of his young wife.  He adored her and he adored her son.

“It is just you and me, Derry,” the old man had said in the first moment of bereavement; “we’ve got to stick it out together—­”

And they had stuck it out until the war had come, and patriotism had flared, and the staunch old soldier had spurned this—­changeling.

It seemed to Derry that if his mother could only step down from the picture she might make things right for him.  But she would not step down.  She would go on smiling her gentle painted smile as if nothing really mattered in the whole wide world.

Thus, with his father asleep in the lacquered bed, and his mother smiling in her gilded frame, the son stood alone in the great shell of a house which had in it no beating heart, no throbbing soul to answer his need.

Derry’s rooms were furnished in a lower key than those in which his father’s taste had been followed.  There were gray rugs and gray walls, some old mahogany, the snuff-box picture of Napoleon over his desk, a dog-basket of brown wicker in a corner.

Muffin, Derry’s Airedale, stood at attention as his master came in.  He knew that the length of his sojourn depended on his manners.

A bright fire was burning, a long chair slanted across the hearthrug.  Derry got into a gray dressing gown and threw himself into the chair.  Muffin, with a solicitous sigh, sat tentatively on his haunches.  His master had had no word for him.  Things were very bad indeed, when Derry had no word for his dog.

At last it came.  “Muffin—­it’s a rotten old world.”

Muffin’s tail beat the rug.  His eager eyes asked for more.

It came—­“Rotten.”

Derry made room among the pillows, and Muffin curled up beside him in rapturous silence.  The fire snapped and flared, flickered and died.  Bronson tiptoed in to ask if Derry wanted him.  Young Martin, who valeted Derry when Bronson would let him, followed with more proffers of assistance.

Derry sent them both away.  “I am going to bed.”

But he did not go to bed.  He read a letter which his mother had written before she died.  He had never broken the seal until now.  For on the outside of the envelope were these words in fine feminine script:  “Not to be opened until the time comes when my boy Derry is tempted to break his promise.”