Father and son sat together in the dining-room, smoking their after-dinner cigars, and speaking very little, as their custom was when together. With its snow-white table-cloth set off by the glass and cut flowers and the rich purple of the old port in the decanter; with its picture-hung walls, its massive mahogany sideboard gleaming with silver, amid which displayed itself opulently a huge salver presented to Matthew Lanyon, Esquire, by his fellow-townsmen on the completion of his third year of mayoralty; with its great red-shaded lamp suspended over the table, and its dark marble fireplace,--the room had an air of warmth and generous comfort that spoke of a long continuance of worldly ease. In his younger days Matthew Lanyon had roved about the world, picking up much knowledge of men in new lands where life was rude, and a little money wherewith to start a career when he returned to civilisation. His return was speedier than either himself or his friends had anticipated. The latter beheld him married to a sweet flower-like girl whom he had met not long before in Australia; but more than this they did not learn. He was not given to offering information as to his doings, and there was that suggestion of haughtiness behind his frank young smile which forbade questioning. He was there; his wife was there. The friends must accept both on their merits. He had served his articles as a solicitor before leaving England. He turned to his profession for maintenance and bought a share in a cousin's practice in Ayresford. He was to have made his fortune, gone away again with his young wife into the wide world, and seen all the wonders that it held. But as in the case of many other young dreams, it seemed otherwise to the gods. Wealth had come quickly, and he had added gradually to his little home until it had become a great house, and his cousin had died, and his wife had died, and in Ayresford he had lived all the time, married and widowed, and now the longing for change had gone, and in Ayresford he hoped that he himself would die, in the home endeared to him by so many memories, in the bed consecrated by the pale sweet shadow of her who even now seemed to lie by his side. Wealth had come, yet much of it had gone; how, no man knew but himself and one other; he had toiled hard to win it, was toiling hard at sixty to win it back. And how strenuously he toiled, again no man knew; least of all his son. The desultory talk had drooped. Suddenly Matthew Lanyon plunged his hand in the breast pocket of his dress-coat and drew out an old-fashioned miniature, which, after regarding it for a few moments, he handed to Sylvester. “I've been rummaging about to-day and found this. Perhaps you'd like to have it.” “My mother!” said Sylvester.