His ring brought one of the new Chinese servants to the door, a quiet man, soft-footed as a cat, and clothed in freshly-laundered white. Standing in the hall under the light he watched this spectral figure flit noiselessly up the stairway. The hall, papered in a deep reddish-purple on which here and there the gleam of gold arabesques was faintly visible, was wide and dim. It would require a galaxy of lamps thoroughly to dispel the gloom that lurked in its dusky corners. A stately staircase, thickly carpeted and with a darkly-polished hand-rail, ran up in front of him. There was a light again at the top of this throwing faint glimmerings on receding stretches of wall, also somberly papered. Through the wide arch on his right he could look into a half-lighted parlor, where a globe or two in the chandelier shone a translucent yellow. To his left the doors into the reception-room were open, and here by a table, a reading lamp at his elbow, sat Beauregard Allen smoking a cigar. He was in evening dress, but a button or two of unloosened waist-coat, and the air of sprawling ease that marked his attitude, did not suggest the trim alertness of one garbed and tuned for festival. “Good evening, Parrish,” he said. “The girls will be down in a minute. I’m going to beg off. Can’t drag me away from a good cigar and comfortable chair on such a damned cold night.” His face was flushed; he had evidently been drinking more than was consistent with a strictly temperate standard, a condition which often marked him after dinner. But the old tendency toward an open and unabashed inebriety had been conquered. Well-dressed, his beard trimmed, the sense of degradation and failure lifted from him, he looked a stalwart, personable man, in whom the joy of life was still buoyantly and coarsely alive. The Colonel, leaning against the door frame, was about to launch into the desultory conversation that fills gaps, when the rustle of skirts on the stairs caught his ear. June and Rosamund were descending, their cloaks on their arms that they might show themselves in their new finery. Their mourning for their mother took the form of transparent black gauze, through which the delicate whiteness of their youthful arms and shoulders gleamed. They laughed as they met the Colonel’s eye, both slightly abashed by the unwonted splendor of their attire.