nightcap, Haward sat and drank his wine, slowly, with long pauses between the emptying and the filling of the slender, tall-stemmed glass.  A window was open, and the wind blowing in made the candles to flicker.  With the wind came a murmur of leaves and the wash of the river,—­stealthy and mournful sounds that sorted not with the lighted room, the cheerful homeliness of the flowered hangings, the gleeful lady and child above the mantelshelf.  Haward felt the incongruity:  a slow sea voyage, and a week in that Virginia which, settled one hundred and twenty years before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned him, he thought, from sounds of the street, and yet to-night he missed them, and would have had the town again.  When an owl hooted in the walnut-tree outside his window, and in the distance, as far away as the creek quarter, a dog howled, and the silence closed in again, he rose, and began to walk to and fro, slowly, thinking of the past and the future.  The past had its ghosts,—­not many; what spectres the future might raise only itself could tell.  So far as mortal vision went, it was a rose-colored future; but on such a night of silence that was not silence, of loneliness that was filled with still, small voices, of heavy darkness without, of lights burning in an empty house, it was rather of ashes of roses that one thought.

Haward went to the open window, and with one knee upon the window seat looked out into the windy, starlit night.  This was the eastern face of the house, and, beyond the waving trees, there were visible both the river and the second and narrower creek which on this side bounded the plantation.  The voice with which the waters swept to the sea came strongly to him.  A large white moth sailed out of the darkness to the lit window, but his presence scared it away.

Looking through the walnut branches, he could see a light that burned steadily, like a candle set in a window.  For a moment he wondered whence it shone; then he remembered that the glebe lands lay in that direction.  The parish was building a house for its new minister, when he left Virginia, those many years ago.  Suddenly he recalled that the minister—­who had seemed to him a bluff, downright, honest fellow—­had told him of a little room looking out upon an orchard, and had said that it should be the child’s.

It was possible that the star which pierced the darkness might mark that room.  He knit his brows in an effort to remember when, before this day, he had last thought of a child whom he had held in his arms and comforted, one splendid dawn, upon a hilltop, in a mountainous region.  He came to the conclusion that he must have forgotten her quite six years ago.  Well, she would seem to have thriven under his neglect,—­and he saw again the girl who had run for the golden guinea.  It was true that when he had put her there where that light was shining, it was with some shadowy idea of giving her gentle breeding, of making a lady of her.  But man’s purposes are fleeting, and often gone with the morrow.  He had forgotten his purpose; and perhaps it was best this way,—­perhaps it was best this way.