For the next few days Sir Gilbert felt thoroughly unsettled and out of sorts. His ordinary avocations seemed to have lost all interest for him; he was unable to fix his attention on anything outside the special current of his thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time. He shut himself up in his own room, a small apartment which opened out of the library, and even Everard Lisle was only admitted to the briefest possible audience each forenoon. His mental attitude at this time was a puzzle to himself. A wonderful thing had come to pass. One which, had an inkling of it been permitted him beforehand, he should have assured himself could not fail to fill his few remaining days with a happiness undreamt of, and almost too deep to find expression in words. A gift, the most precious of any he could have asked for (seeing that we cannot bring back our lost ones from the tomb), had been vouchsafed to him, yet, strange to say, he felt little or none of that elation which would have seemed the natural outcome of such a state of affairs. Why was this, and to what cause was it attributable? He tried to look forward to the presence of his newly-found grandson as to something that would crown his life with a blessing, and to mentally picture their daily life together in time to come, but he derived no pleasure from the process; neither did the future, now that he looked at it with fresh eyes, as it were, take to itself any added brightness from the fact that a son of his son would succeed him when the time should have come for him to pass into the Silent Land. “Is it that my heart is dead?” he sadly asked himself, “or is it because I am so old and have gone through so much, that only the ghost of either joy or sorrow will ever keep me company again? Or is it,” he went on, “because in this youth who has so suddenly intruded himself into my life I can discern nothing that serves to recall his father to memory, nor any likeness, however vague, to any of my pictured ancestors in the long gallery—who are his ancestors also—that I seem in no way drawn towards him? I cannot tell why it is so. I only know that it is.” In one respect, however, he derived a certain amount of mordant satisfaction from the knowledge that he would now be followed by an heir in the direct line of descent. His detested kinsman, Colonel Eustace Clare, who, he felt sure, never missed a day without hoping it would bring the tidings of his death, would now, at what might be termed the eleventh hour, be baulked of his chance of succession to the title, even as the cutting off of the entail in years gone by had deprived him of all prospect of ever succeeding to the estates.