An old man!
It must be so since he had taken to looking back.
He had been young once.
Lost youth stood mocking him in the shadows. Laughter, love, hope, and strength,—all had been his.
A mother's hand seemed stretching out from the past years to smooth the fair hair from his forehead, whilst mother-eyes looked into his own laughing ones.
Those mother eyes! Had they ever looked anything but tenderly into his, though they had often been tear-dimmed in pain?
Pain he had inflicted carelessly enough, and, as carelessly, turned away.
Memory had bitter stabs for an old man sitting alone in the twilight.
Sir Stephen gulped down his punch and tried to hum a line of his favourite rhyme.
"Let's drink and be jolly, and drown melancholy;
So merrily, then, let us joy, too, and sing,
So fill up your bowls, all ye loyal——"