Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/105

Rh the thought. He strode up and down the room. She was so pretty, so pretty! He looked at the little picture face he always carried in the locket she had given him; and then for the first time he wondered if he had himself changed. He looked over the walls for a glass, but remembered he had never possessed one, or seen himself for years. He went into another room, and there found a glass left by his nephew. He went up to it, then fell back as if he had been struck. What! was this, then, Henry?—the great artist, the fond lover—a poor white old man—an old man! He thought of all his dreams for the future. "My God! there is no future," he said. He sat down and laughed his foolish young heart away. Then flung himself upon his bed and slept like a man who was broken with much sorrow. He woke with the gloom of a great cloud overhanging him, and lay long before he arose; he felt too weary to move. "And every morning," he said, "when I felt so tired, I thought it laziness that held me down, and it was age—old man—age." In the evening he went out to cut wood for firing, but he laid his chopper beside the uncut logs after a few blows. "I could fight against