half-extinct sensations, as one might run over the jarred and half-silent keys of an old piano in the dark. This surprised him at first in his loneliness--then, when he had realized what it was, hurt him a little, rousing old wrath and bitterness, so that he would sometimes lay down his pen or close his book and all the past would come before him--the past, in which John his son had disappointed, mocked, insulted, and baffled his father. He would not allow himself to realize the presence of these children in the house, but he could not avoid thinking of the individual who stood between him and them, who was so real while they were so visionary. Always John! He had tried to live for years without thought of him and had been tranquil; it was grievous to be compelled thus to think of him again. This all happened, however, in the seclusion of his own mind, in the quiet of his library, and no one knew anything of it; not his daughter, who thought she knew his looks by heart; nor his servant, who had spelled him out by many guesses in the dark--as servants generally do--and imagined that he had his master at his fingers’ ends. But during all this time while these touches were playing upon him, bringing out ghosts of old sensations, muffled sounds and tones forgotten, Mr. Musgrave publicly ignored the fact that there were any children in the house, and contrived not to see them, nor to hear them, with a force of self-government and resolution which, in a nobler cause, would have been beyond all praise.