The mood passed quickly. The old man sank again into his chair. He half-smiled, musingly, with something of cunning calculation in the smile. When he spoke, his weak, almost whispering tones were wheedling rather than harsh.
"You wouldn't kill your old uncle before his time, boy?"
The effect of that changed attitude was electric. Young John's defiance was gone, like a flame puffed out. This was his uncle, who had given him a home since boyhood—his only living relative. He sank down on the floor at the old man's knees.
"You needn't answer, my boy. I know you would not. I've no wish to be hard on you. Just a promise—a little promise. You'll give the old man that?"
"Anything I can, uncle," young John returned, rather doubtfully.
"You can. It won't mean much to you—you will know why without my saying it. You are to promise to have nothing to do with her—nothing, you understand—as long as I am in the house."
The young man started. The words he was listening to, though so weak as to be barely audible, were spoken with apparent deliberation. Yet, obviously, they could mean very little. The end could not be far away. Had not the doctor said—
The aged invalid, smiling sardonically, seemed to read his nephew's thoughts. He raised a thin hand in ironic admonition.
"There are no strings to it, my boy. That's the promise. It is all I ask of you."
"I promise!" young John exclaimed.
The old man nodded, with satisfaction.
"Though it isn't much to promise, I wish it to be binding," he continued. "Will you raise your right hand?"
"You don't rely on my word?"
"A dying man's fancy," soothed the uncle, with a weak chuckle.
Young John raised his right hand.
"Now go!"
The mandate came with unexpected force. Young John Bamber's instinct was to remain; but he could not stand out against his uncle's will. Even while death waited in the shadows, old John remained master of his house.
Young John obeyed. As he opened the door to step into the dark hall, he glanced back and saw the quivering figure sitting in the chair; the face, with its high-arched nose, bent inflexibly toward him; the eyes still returning his gaze.
At the foot of the stairs the young man met Mrs. Murdock, the gaunt Scotch housekeeper.
"How is he?" she inquired, in a whisper.
"You had better go up," he replied.
On instinct, he waited, there at the foot of the stairs; and instinct was right. She had hardly vanished ino the shadowy upper room when her tall figure reappeared at the door. In the light which flickered up the stairs from the gas lamp in the lower hall, he could see her hands opening and closing spasmodically—her only symptom of excitement.
"Please come, Mr. Bamber," she requested, quietly.
From her tone, and her vibrating hands, he knew what he should find: his uncle, dead in the chair; the face, with its hawk nose, sunk on the breast; the firelight still playing ruddily upon him.
Young John Bamber thought of the solemn oath he had just taken, and of how it now meant nothing.
II
THE bleak afternoon which saw old John Bamber laid out in his library should have been dark; but in that steel town the cloudy days, when smoke and storm-wrack hid the sun, were brighter than much of the sunshiny weather. It was lurid, flickering brightness.
The red flame of the converter, bursting into the sky, shed its glow across main thoroughfares and back alleys, and pried into many darkened places. It peered through the leaded panes of the small window above the bookcase, and so entered the gloomy library where old John lay in his coffin. This library was under his former apartment. In that room the converter's light had caught him many a time, sitting in his arm-chair. Now it played about his knife-blade nose, softened his grim mouth, but failed utterly to redden his livid face as he lay there.
It was not much of a funeral. The minister and the undertaker came, since to them it was another job of work. Young John and Mrs. Murdock were present as a matter of course.
One other was there—little Jarvins, the sculptor, with his crinkled white beard, hunched shoulders, and furtive, squinting eyes. He had been the nearest approach to a friend old John Bamber had had in his later years. They had played backgammon and chess together. Usually, their evening had ended in a quarrel, Jarvins slamming out of the house with a snarl and a promise never to return; but he always had returned. He had a better right than most to be at the funeral; better far than any of the neighbors, who had kept away from the churlish old man in his life time, and who now, fittingly, contented themselves with watching and commenting from their porches, as young John, with the undertaker and two of the drivers, slid the coffin into the hearse.
It was a mean funeral, indeed, and soon over. From it young John returned to the rambling house, occupied now by the housekeeper and the shadows.
The one to whom his thoughts chiefly turned had not been at those last rites. She had had no place there. Now, her time was come. Until the funeral was done, he had refrained from visiting Mary Lane. She would know why: she understood the unreasoning hatred that had been in old John Bamber's mind, engendered by a petty quarrel of years ago with her father.
In his own room on the lower floor, the young man carefully parted over again his straight, dark hair—already precisely in order without any such attention; donned a fresh collar, though the one he had been wearing was fairly immaculate; employed meticulous fingers before the mirror to fit himself in every respect for Mary Lane's company. He might have seen a handsome, though pale countenance, and square shoulders in that mirror; instead, his thoughts dwelt on a petite, dainty girl, with blue eyes, whose curling hair was adorned rather than hidden by a nurse's white cap.
What was it that impelled John Bamber to go up for a moment to his uncle's room, before he visited Mary Lane? He had no business there. Nothing of his had been left behind in that vacant room. He might more naturally have donned his overcoat and walked from the house, with the quick stride that would have carried him to the place that was in his thoughts. Instead, he slowly mounted the stairs, in the yellow glare of the gas light in the hallway, and, seeing the door of that room ajar, pushed it farther open. The red glow of the converter was shining in through the far window.
He stopped at the threshold, and stared for one incredulous moment; then, with a terrible cry, and hands before his face, started back. His foot tripped on the top stair. He fell headlong to the bottom, and lay still.
III
ON THE third day, the raving, gibbering mouth was quiet; the staring eyes closed; young John Bamber slept—not the troubled, fiercely interrupted sleep of delirium, but the healthy sleep of a tired man.
The slender girl, whose pretty face beneath her white cap was weary almost to
