In the angle of the two halls is the great room which Wing used as his library. It is some twenty-four by thirty-six feet, high-posted, and has a warm, sunny outlook to the south and west. It is lined with books and pictures; a great desk stands in the centre front, and lounges and easy chairs are scattered about in inviting confusion. The room above was his bedchamber, adjoining which is a bathroom, in its day the wonder and challenge of Millbank. An iron spiral stairway leads from the lower to the upper room, so that the occupant has the two rooms at his command independent of the remainder of the house. This was Wing’s special domain. Outside these two rooms, Mrs. Parlin ruled as undisputed as during her thirty years of wifehood. Within, Wing held control, and while no small share of his personal work was done here, the great room saw much of his private life of which his everyday acquaintances had little suspicion. The cases contained many a volume that belongs to literature rather than law, and here he found that best of rest from the onerous demands of a constantly growing practice--complete change in matter and manner of thought. On the night of the 10th of May, 1880, the light burned late in Lawyer Wing’s library. It was the scandal of Millbank that this occurred often. The village was given to regarding the night as a time when no man should work. “Early to bed and early to rise” was its motto, and though an opposite practice had left Theodore Wing with more of health, wealth, and wisdom than most Millbankians possessed, he had never succeeded in reconciling his townsmen to his methods. But to-night conditions were more outrageous than usual. Mrs. Merrick, from the bed of an ailing grandchild, glanced up the hill at midnight and saw the light still burning. Old Doctor Portus, coming villageward from a confinement case, an hour later, saw the light as he passed the house and shook his head with dire prognostications. If Wing should be sick, old Doctor Portus would certainly not be called in attendance, and therefore he could measure this outrage of nature’s laws with a mind uninfluenced by personal bias. At four o’clock, however, a farmer’s son, who had yielded the night to Millbank’s temptations, hurrying farmward to his morning chores, saw no light growing dim in the first flush of the spring morning to attract his attention to a scene that later knowledge revealed. At six, the hired man came down the back stairs and went through the woodshed to the barns. Turning the heavy wooden bar that held the great doors fast, he swung them open and let in the soft morning air.