He went down the steps and to the corner and turned west to Astor Street. When he reached the house of his father, he stopped under a street-lamp, looking up at the big, stern old mansion questioningly. It had taken on a different look for him since he had heard Sherrill's account of his father; there was an appeal to him that made his throat grow tight, in its look of being unoccupied, in the blank stare of its unlighted windows which contrasted with the lighted windows in the houses on both sides, and in the slight evidences of disrepair about it. He waited many minutes, his hand upon the key in his pocket; yet he could not go in, but instead walked on down the street, his thoughts and feelings in a turmoil.
He could not call up any sense that the house was his, any more than he had been able to when Sherrill had told him of it. He own a house on that street! Yet was that in itself any more remarkable than that he should be the guest, the friend of such people as the Sherrills? No one as yet, since Sherrill had told him he was Corvet's son, had called him by name; when they did, what would they call him? Alan Conrad still? Or Alan Corvet?
He noticed, up a street to the west, the lighted sign of a drug store and turned up that way; he had promised, he had recollected now, to write to . . . those in Kansas—he could not call them "father" and "mother" any more—and tell them what he had discovered as soon as he arrived. He could not tell them that, but he could write them at least that he had arrived safely and was well. He bought a postcard in the drug store, and wrote just, "Arrived safely; am well" to John Welton in Kansas. There was a little
