In Mr. Kestern's study the curtains were close drawn and no gas had been lit. They were heavy crimson curtains, thick and old-fashioned, and they hung motionless, completely screening the windows. A fire flickered fitfully in the grate, with so little light that the army of dancing invading shadows rushed even more and more tempestuously and overwhelmingly forward towards it. They leapt over the sombre-backed books in their close rows on the shelves around the room, flicking a letter tooled in gold here and there as they passed. In the corners they already ruled supreme. High upon the walls they hung, like gathered clouds. Only immediately before the grate, where the big _secretaire_ stood with its roll-top lid pushed back, was their kingdom not yet. The little light showed the open desk, its half-filled and neatly-labelled pigeon-holes, its inkstand, blotter and loose papers. Left and right of the centre, the big drawers were all shut, save one, that gaped half-open. The heavy piece seemed almost as it were to brood over that drawer. It was seldom open. It held Paul's old school reports and essays and some ancient sermon notes, chiefly things he did not guess were still in existence. A few of them, disordered, lay half in, half out, tossed down there by a quick movement. One lay on the floor, white in the gloom, as it had fallen from the reader's hand. The reader himself had slipped from his seat. The revolving chair in which he had been sitting, was pushed slightly back, and he himself was kneeling, head forward, face hid in his hands. Mr. Kestern often prayed there thus, busy at his sermons, and there was a footstool below the desk for him to kneel upon. But he was not kneeling on it now. His was no premeditated praying. He had dropped the manuscript, turned the gas hastily out, and fallen forward there, in one swift motion, some half-hour or more ago. The fire had thus begun to die, but he paid no heed. His head, with its hair already more nearly white than grey, had scarcely moved in his hands for all that time. Yet if the man's bowed shoulders were all but motionless, the rapid agonised thoughts lanced this way and that without ceasing through his tortured soul. Now they were flying back down the years, revealing, like lightning flashes, other great moments in the drama of his son: the moment he had knelt praying--good God, how he had prayed!--and waiting for the news of the birth in the room above; the moment when he, and his wife with him this time, had knelt and wrestled with God in an agony for the life of the lad upon whom the consulting doctors were even then pronouncing a final decision. In each case, there had been steps at last outside announcing what had seemed and what he had acclaimed to be a veritable miracle. But now--ah! now....