He was a shrewd judge of horseflesh, and, as he often remarked since he could no longer own and race a string, he took pleasure in seeing the fine animals of other men achieve credit on the turf. Despite his early gambling and racing proclivities he had always been esteemed a man of immaculate honor and held a high social position. This ascendancy was supplemented by certain associations of special piety incongruously enough. As long as his wife had lived he accompanied her to church every Sunday morning; he drew the line, it is true, at the evening service. He carried a large prayerbook, and his notable personality rendered his presence marked. He read the responses with a devotional air and a solemn voice and listened to the sermon with an appearance of unflagging interest and absorption; as he seemed to take it for granted that he could go to heaven on the footing of an honorary member, his persuasion was in a manner accepted, and it might have been a source of surprise to his friends to realize that, after all, he was not a professedly religious man.
For some weeks the two incongruous companions lived on in great peace and amity in the seclusion of the old plantation house, a rambling frame structure far too large for the shrunken number of its inmates. The broad verandas surrounding it on three sides scarcely knew a footfall; the upper story was unoccupied save for the Colonel’s bedroom, for Treherne had selected a chamber among the vacant apartments on the ground floor that, through a glass door opening on the veranda, permitted his egress betimes to take up his self-arrogated supervisory duties on the place hours before his host, always a late riser, was astir.
One night,--a memorable night,--a dreadful thing happened. The Colonel lay asleep in his big mahogany four-poster; the placidity of venerable age on his face was scarcely less appealing than the innocence of childhood; his snowy hair on the pillow gave back a silvery gleam to the red suffusions from the hearth. If he dreamed, it was of some gentle phase of yore, for his breathing was soft and regular, his consciousness far away adown the misty realms of the past, irrevocable save in these soft and sleeping illusions. The old house was still and silent. At long intervals an errant gust stole around a corner and tried a window. Then it skulked away and, for a time, a mute peace reigned.