Lyddon, who had been more moved and agitated that day than ever in his life before, shut himself up in the old study. As he sat in the great worn leather chair all the scenes which had passed in that old room returned to him and the flight of time was like a dream in the night. He recalled Angela in her white frock climbing up on his knee and, when he would have turned away from her, thrusting the odd volume of the “Odyssey” in his face and asking him in a wailing, babyish voice: “Do, pray, Mr. Lyddon, read me something out of this nice old book.” How childishly clever it was of her to find out that the “Odyssey” was the spell through which she was to conjure him! And she was gone, perhaps never to return. Then Archie, but yesterday a lad and now a man, was gone to take his place upon the firing line. Neville was Lyddon’s first pupil at Harrowby, a handsome, gentle, silent stripling, fond of reading and fonder still of mathematics, which he mastered with a marvelous ease and precision that delighted Lyddon. And Richard, the most brilliant of them all, his character as admirable as his mind, his superiority affectionately proclaimed by Neville and laughingly denied by Richard. Never were there two brothers’ souls more closely knit together. And the pride and joy of Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine in their children, for Angela was a child to them, had always seemed to Lyddon one of the most beautiful things in existence. Into this exquisite family life had come in the twinkling of an eye a dissension and division, a separation, the most frightful that could be imagined--as much worse than death as disgrace is worse than death. To-day only had that great gaping wound been healed. It did not seem fanciful to Lyddon that Richard Tremaine, lying stark in his new-made grave under the bare branches of the weeping willows which made dappled shadows in the moonlight, should in the far-off land of spirits know of this healed wound. It seemed to Lyddon as if Richard’s life were like a broken melody, and at the thought he groaned aloud. Presently he took down a battered volume and read from it those words of Sir Walter Raleigh: “O eloquent and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none have dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far scattered greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words: ‘_Hic jacet_.’” Everything in the room seemed to speak Richard’s name to Lyddon, to cry aloud his virtues, his gifts, his graces, and Lyddon, to escape from them, flung out of doors.