It was his duty, it must be his pride, to keep that name clean and high; to keep that home a temple of unsullied honor. No enemy must tear it down, no slander must soil its whiteness, no treachery must dishonor it from within. The sun, sinking behind it, threw out spokes of light as from the red hub of a tremendous invisible wheel. The sun had the look of an heraldic device. The home was as quiet, too, as an armorial bearing. The children were taking their afternoon nap, no doubt, in the nursery. No doubt the old people were asleep in their upper room. His wife, where was she? He would love to find her stretched out slumbering across her bed like a long Easter lily laid along a pulpit. He did not see even Cuff, the old negro, who was doubtless asleep in the barn on a pile of harness. RoBards tied his horse to the hitching post and moved with a lordly leisure to the porch. He had actually forgotten that there was a stranger in his house. His heart had been too perfectly attuned to admit a discord. He paused on the top step and surveyed his domain. Along the contour of the horizon—and his horizon was his own—a team of big white horses moved, leaning against the collars that ruffed their necks. The plough they dragged through the soil flashed back the sunset as its keen share bounded from a sharp stone. After it plodded the farmer, the lines about his loins, his whip sketching a long scrawl across the sky. He was going to put in his winter wheat. Along another hill an orchard was etched, the sky visible beneath the branches that joined to form arches in a green colonade. Old fences of rail and stone staggered up and down the slopes, each of them a signature of some purchase his father had made, some parcel of land bought from some dead farmer. Beneath RoBards’ eyes, was the little garrison of tulip trees where his babies slept on earth. There was dew on his lashes and an edged pebble in his throat as his lips knit in a grimace of regret. Yet there was a holiness about his pain, and a longing that nothing should disturb this Sabbath in his soul. He turned to enter the open door, but he heard murmurs and a kind of hissing whisper that surprised him. He moved toward his library, and there, stretched out on the couch where he himself had sometimes rested when worn out with his lawbooks, he saw Harry Chalender lying on his right side. The quilt had fallen from one shoulder, since his left arm was lifted to enfold the woman who sat curled on a hassock before him and had just laid her lips upon his. RoBards could not move, or speak. He seemed not even to think or feel. He merely existed there. He was nothing but a witness, all witness. After a long kiss and a long sigh of bitter-sweet bliss, Patty murmured: “How wicked we are! how wicked!” [Illustration: “HOW WICKED WE ARE! HOW WICKED!”] Then she turned her beautiful head and stared across her shoulder and saw RoBards. He could think of nothing but of how beautiful she was.