And, companied by these ethereal fancies, she came, before she was aware of it, to the substantial steps of Home, where began the snuggest of all snug grooves....

She arrived with the intention, already well formed, of retiring forthwith to her room, and—­probably—­spending the whole evening there.  But here, as it chanced, interruption fell across her thought.  Just at her own door, Cally almost ran into a man who was standing still upon the sidewalk, as if waiting for some one:  a tall old gentleman standing and leaning upon his cane.  Cally came out of her absorption just in time to escape collision.

“I beg your pardon!...” she began, with manner, stepping back.

But then her feet faltered, and her voice died suddenly away, as she saw that this silent old man was her neighbor, Colonel John B. Dalhousie, whom she had never spoken to in her life.

The Colonel was regarding her with frightening fixity.  The girl’s descent from the empyrean to reality had the stunning suddenness of a fall:  she showed it in her blanching face.  Now, as the two thus stood, the old man raised a hand and swept off his military hat in a bow of elaborate courtesy.

“An apology from Miss Heth,” said he, in a purring voice, “is the last thing on earth one of my name would have ventured to expect.”

Doubtless the meeting had been obliged to come some day:  Cally had often thought of it with dread, once escaped it by a narrow margin.  That it should have come now, in the gentler afterglow of this curiously disturbing day, seemed like the grimness of destiny....  No fear of over-generosity here; no gleam in these eyes of brave and beautiful things....

“But you ask my pardon,” the smooth-cutting voice went on.  “It is granted, of course, my dear.  You took my son’s heart, and broke it, but that’s a bauble.  You took his honor, and I kicked him out, but honor’s a name in a printed book.  You took his life, and I buried him, but sons, we know, cannot live forever.  What is there here to make a father’s heart grow hard?”

Cally raised her hand to her throat.  She felt suffocating, or else a little faint.  From life she seemed to have stepped into the house of dead men’s bones; and here she could see at play old emotions not met before in her guarded life:  shrivelling contempt, undying hatred, immortal unforgiveness.  Nevertheless, the subtlest stroke in the naked confrontation was that something in the father’s expression, distorted though it was, reminded her of the son, whose face in this world she should see no more.

She tried to move past the face of her Nemesis, appeared physically incapable of motion; tried to speak, and had little more success.

“I—­I’m—­very sorry—­for—­” she said, indistinctly, and her ears were mocked with her ghastly inadequacy.  “I—­I’ve—­”

“Sorry?  Why, of course you are.  Doubtless the little unpleasantness has marred your happiness at times.  But I am gratified to know that you have other young men for your amusement, now that my son has withdrawn himself from your reach.”