Never had silence seemed more oppressive nor his sense of loneliness greater.  Yet the boom of the ocean was distinct to the ear, and human presence no farther away than the terrace where Arthur Strange could be seen smoking out his cigar in solitude.  The silence and the loneliness were in Roger’s own soul; and, in face of the expected revelation which would make or unmake his future, the desolation they wrought was measureless.

To cut his suspense short, he rose at length and hurried out to the spot designated by Miss Strange as the best point from which to keep watch upon his father’s window.  It was at the end of the piazza where the honeysuckle hung, and the odour of the blossoms, so pleasing to his father, well-nigh overpowered him not only by its sweetness but by the many memories it called up.  Visions of that father as he looked at all stages of their relationship passed in a bewildering maze before him.  He saw him as he appeared to his childish eyes in those early days of confidence when the loss of the mother cast them in mutual dependence upon each other.  Then a sterner picture of the relentless parent who sees but one straight course to success in this world and the next.  Then the teacher and the matured adviser; and then—­oh, bitter change! the man whose hopes he had crossed—­whose life he had undone, and all for her who now came stealing upon the scene with her slim, white, jewelled hand forever lifted up between them.  And she!  Had he ever seen her more clearly?  Once more the dainty figure stepped from fairy-land, beauteous with every grace that can allure and finally destroy a man.  And as he saw, he trembled and wished that these moments of awful waiting might pass and the test be over which would lay bare his father’s heart and justify his fears or dispel them forever.

But the crisis, if crisis it was, was one of his own making and not to be hastened or evaded.  With one quick glance at his father’s window, he turned in his impatience towards the sea whose restless and continuous moaning had at length struck his ear.  What was in its call to-night that he should thus sway towards it as though drawn by some dread magnetic force?  He had been born to the dashing of its waves and knew its every mood and all the passion of its song from frolicsome ripple to melancholy dirge.  But there was something odd and inexplicable in its effect upon his spirit as he faced it at this hour.  Grim and implacable—­ a sound rather than a sight—­it seemed to hold within its invisible distances the image of his future fate.  What this image was and why he should seek for it in this impenetrable void, he did not know.  He felt himself held and was struggling with this influence as with an unknown enemy when there rang out, from the hall within, the preparatory chimes for which his ear was waiting, and then the nine slow strokes which signalized the moment when he was to look for his father’s presence at the window.