The great house lay very still in the evening sunshine that slanted soft and red on its gray old walls and turned its many windows to amber fires, its castellated roof to a rose-red carving against the pale blue eastern sky. Over the great hall door that opened on a wide stone terrace, grim with lions wrought in stone, was carved the motto of the master of the house--“What Marchant held let Marchant hold.” The words were repulsive and ironical in their pride to the man who looked up at them involuntarily as he got out of his carriage and went into his house. He passed wearily through the hall to his library, and locked the door behind him. He must have time to think; must be alone. He dreaded the sound of the light knock at the door, which would mean Cristiane had come to see what he had brought her from London. And the motto of his house over his door had been like a blow on the eyes to him to-night. “What Marchant held let Marchant hold.” He, Gaspard le Marchant, had learned to-day that a resistless hand was loosening his own grip on the house of his fathers; of his lands and money; of his life itself. But it was not the losing of those things that made his upper lip damp with sweat as he sat alone in the dim, Russia leather scented library. “Cristiane,” he said to himself very quietly. “Who can I leave with Cristiane?” His thought was all for his only daughter, the child of his love. Seventeen years old, cherished, adored, beautiful--who would take care of her when he was gone? And go he must, for the great London doctor had told him so that very morning. “It is a matter of months, Sir Gaspard; perhaps of weeks.” The words in this hard gentleness seemed to ring still in the ears of the man who sat alone. “A matter of a very few months, and if you have anything to arrange it would be best, perhaps, to see to it at once.” Gaspard le Marchant’s voice had been quite quiet as he answered the words that were his death-warrant, but he had gone straight from the doctor’s house and taken the first train home to Marchant Place. He had not felt really well for a year past, but he had never thought it was serious when he paid that two-days’ visit to London; he had gone up more to buy new clothes than to see a doctor. It had been a cursory visit, and, like many such things, had held the tidings of death in it. A few weeks more and Gaspard le Marchant would be done with this world, and powerless to care for the child for whom that other Cristiane had given her life seventeen years ago. At the thought, another thought, that had been in the man’s mind all day, came over him with ineffable power. The doctor had meant that if there was anything he wanted to do before he died he had better do it. Well, there was one thing--call it the whim of a dying man if you liked! He must go once more to that grave where they had laid all that was left of the woman who loved him, seventeen years ago.