Perhaps you might have thought so, too, glancing into that lofty chamber, with its glowing hangings of ruby and gold, its exquisite pictures, its inlaid tables, its twinkling chandelier, its perfumed warmth, and glitter, and luxury.

But Carl Walraven, lying back in a big easy-chair, in slippers and dressing-gown, smoking his costly cheroots, looked out at the dismal evening with the blackest of bitter, black scowls.

“Confound the weather!” muttered Mr. Walraven, between strong, white teeth.  “Why the deuce does it always rain on the twenty-fifth of November?  Seventeen years ago, on the twenty-fifth of this horrible month, I was in Paris, and Miriam was—­Miriam be hanged!” He stopped abruptly, and pitched his cigar out of the window.  “You’ve turned over a new leaf, Carl Walraven, and what the demon do you mean by going back to the old leaves?  You’ve come home from foreign parts to your old and doting mother—­I thought she would be in her dotage by this time—­and you’re a responsible citizen, and an eminently rich and respectable man.  Carl, my boy, forget the past, and behave yourself for the future; as the copy-books say:  ‘Be virtuous and you will be happy.’”

He laughed to himself, a laugh unpleasant to hear, and taking up another cigar, went on smoking.

He had been away twenty years, this Carl Walraven, over the world, nobody knew where.  A reckless, self-willed, headstrong boy, he had broken wild and run away from home at nineteen, abruptly and without warning.  Abruptly and without warning he had returned home, one fine morning, twenty years after, and walking up the palatial steps, shabby, and grizzled, and weather-beaten, had strode straight to the majestic presence of the mistress of the house, with outstretched hand and a cool “How are you, mother?”

And Mrs. Walraven knew her son.  He had left her a fiery, handsome, bright-faced lad, and this man before her was gray and black-bearded and weather-beaten and brown, but she knew him.  She had risen with a shrill cry of joy, and held open her arms.

“I’ve come back, you see, mother,” Mr. Carl said, easily, “like the proverbial bad shilling.  I’ve grown tired knocking about this big world, and now, at nine-and-thirty, with an empty purse, a light heart, a spotless conscience, and a sound digestion, I’m going to settle down and walk in the way I should go.  You are glad to have your ne’er-do-well back again, I hope, mother?”

Glad!  A widowed mother, lonely and old, glad to have an only son back!  Mrs. Walraven had tightened those withered arms about him closer and closer, with only that one shrill cry: 

“Oh, Carl—­my son! my son!”

“All right, mother!  And now, if there’s anything in this house to eat, I’ll eat it, because I’ve been fasting since yesterday, and haven’t a stiver between me and eternity.  By George! this isn’t such a bad harbor for a shipwrecked mariner to cast anchor in.  I’ve been over the world, mother, from Dan to—­What’s-her-name!  I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor; I’ve been loved and I’ve been hated; I’ve had my fling at everything good and bad under the shining sun, and I come home from it all, subscribing to the doctrine:  ‘There’s nothing new and nothing true.’  And it don’t signify; it’s empty as egg-shells, the whole of it.”