“She is all right, quite, Mr. Cameron,” she said.  “It was but a crisis of the nerves, and to be expected.  And now she demands to see you.”

Grayson, standing in the hall, had a swift vision of a tall figure, which issued with extreme rapidity from the library door, and went up the stairs, much like a horse taking a series of hurdles.  But the figure lost momentum suddenly at the top, hesitated, and apparently moved forward on tiptoe.  Grayson went into the library and sniffed at the unmistakable odor of a pipe.  Then, having opened a window, he went and stood before a great portrait of old Anthony Cardew.  Tears stood in the old man’s eyes, but there was a faint smile on his lips.  He saw the endless procession of life.  First, love.  Then, out of love, life.  Then death.  Grayson was old, but he had lived to see young love in the Cardew house.  Out of love, life.  He addressed a little speech to the picture.

“Wherever you are, sir,” he said, “you needn’t worry any more.  The line will carry on, sir.  The line will carry on.”

Upstairs in the little boudoir Willy Cameron knelt beside the couch, and gathered Lily close in his arms.

CHAPTER LII

Thanksgiving of the year of our Lord 1919 saw many changes.  It saw, slowly emerging from the chaos of war, new nations, like children, taking their first feeble steps.  It saw a socialism which, born at full term might have thrived, prematurely and forcibly delivered, and making a valiant but losing fight for life.  It saw that war is never good, but always evil; that war takes everything and gives nothing, save that sometimes a man may lose the whole world and gain his own soul.

It saw old Anthony Cardew gone to his fathers, into the vast democracy of heaven, and Louis Akers passed through the Traitors’ Gate of eternity to be judged and perhaps reprieved.  For a man is many men, good and bad, and the Judge of the Tower of Heaven is a just Judge.

It saw Jim Doyle a fugitive, Woslosky dead, and the Russian, Ross, bland, cunning and eternally plotting, in New England under another name.  And Mr. Hendricks ordering a new suit for the day of taking office.  And Doctor Smalley tying a bunch of chrysanthemums on Annabelle, against a football game, and taking a pretty nurse to see it.

It saw Ellen roasting a turkey, and a strange young man in the Eagle Pharmacy, a young man who did not smoke a pipe, and allowed no visitors in the back room.  And it saw Willy Cameron in the laboratory of the reopened Cardew Mills, dealing in tons instead of grains and drams, and learning to touch any piece of metal in the mill with a moistened fore-finger before he sat down upon it.

* * * * *

But it saw more than that.