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128 "Lee took your father's bag with him, you know," said his mother, evidently for the sake of saying something. "It was better than that one. It had 'J.S.' painted on it,— John Sebright,—and then underneath, 'Bark Gilderoy.' He had it all along, when we were both young and everything went well,—and later when we lost the Gilderoy—and all those downhill years; and he kept it after we had to stay here ashore. I wonder if Lee's got it still?"

Marden was silent. He thought of his father seldom, and bitterly. But now it was with a touch of pity that he recalled him sitting in the big chair by the stove,—a hulking wreck of a man, broad, squat, with a great, hopeless face mottled in purple veins. He could almost smell again the rank pipe and ranker West India rum, and hear the growl of defeat from under the fierce white mustache, "Here we are in stays, by Christ, in stays, that's where we are!" Then from this vision the lad looked across the table at his mother, gentle, gray-haired, smiling in her sorrow, and a wave of anger