A great noise of talking made him rouse up, wondering dazedly if he had slept. Somebody was shouting out a drinking song, and others, with voices crisp in the chilly air, were disputing together. A torch seemed to glare in his very face, and a man, the first of several stumbling up the steps, nearly fell over him, and swore at him, then dragged him to his feet with a rough, “What are you doing here, sirrah?” Rubbing the dazzle of the light out of his eyes, Hugh saw five or six men about him on the steps, two with torches, who seemed mere troopers, and the others finely dressed. “Is—Colonel Gwyeth here?” he faltered, with a half hope that the meeting might be deferred a bit longer. “Here, Alan, this gentleman has commands for you,” some one called, and laughed. At that another man came briskly up from the street and, shoving the others aside, pushed under the light of the torches. A man of short forty years, and but little above middle height, Hugh perceived, in a velvet suit with a plumed hat and a cloak wrapped up to his chin. Beneath the torchlight his long hair and close-trimmed beard seemed the color of gold, and he had blue eyes that looked angry and his face was flushed. “What’s to do here?” he asked curtly, and a trick of the tone set Hugh’s memory struggling for something that had long been past. “What do you want of me, you knave?” Hugh looked up at the flushed, impatient face, and, stammering to find words, wished it were all over and these men gone, and he were alone with this stranger; then he hesitated desperately, “Colonel Gwyeth, if it like you, I am your son.” Somebody laughed foolishly, and another began, “’Tis a wise child—” but Alan Gwyeth looked Hugh over and then, turning on his heel with a curt “The devil you are!” walked through the open door into the house. The others tramped noisily after him; some one gave Hugh a hasty shove that sent him pitching to the foot of the steps, and as he recovered himself he heard the house-door slammed. CHAPTER VII HOW THE WORLD DEALT BY A GENTLEMAN He could get only a broken sleep, because of a door that was always slamming; sometimes men were laughing, too, but the crash of the closing door was louder still, so loud Hugh woke at last. “It was all a bad dream,” he said in his thoughts, with a lightening of the heart that made him feel like his old self. But next moment his hand touched the damp boards of the doorway in which he was crouched and found them real; across the roadway the dim houses, with the mist that comes before day hanging over them, were real; and so was the blank sky. Then all that had happened last night was true: there was a lad named Hugh Gwyeth, whose father would have none of him, who had not a friend to turn to, nor a penny to his name, nor, except for this cold doorway whither he had crawled, a place to lay his head. Hugh sat up and, as if it were another man’s concern, checked it all off dispassionately.