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70 in the morning, whether the house then had been heated; now he appreciated that it was quite cold and, probably, had been cold for the three days since his father had gone, and his servant had left to look for him. Coming from the street, it was not the chilliness of the house he felt but the stillness of the dead air; when a house is heated, there is always some motion of the air, but this air was stagnant. Alan had dropped his hat on a chair in the hall; he unbuttoned his overcoat but kept it on, and stuffed his gloves into his pocket.

A light in a single room, he thought, would not excite curiosity or attract attention from the neighbors or any one passing in the street; but lights in more than one room might do that. He resolved to turn off the light in each room as he left it, before lighting the next one.

It had been a pleasant as well as a handsome house, if he could judge by the little of it he could see, before the change had come over his father. The rooms were large with high ceilings. The one where he stood, obviously was a library; bookshelves reached three quarters of the way to the ceiling on three of its walls except where they were broken in two places by doorways, and in one place on the south wall by an open fireplace. There was a big library table-desk in the center of the room, and a stand with a shaded lamp upon it nearer the fireplace. A leather-cushioned Morris chair—a lonely, meditative-looking chair—was by the stand and at an angle toward the hearth; the rug in front of it was quite worn through and showed the floor underneath. A sympathy toward his father, which Sherrill had not been able to make him feel, came to Alan as he reflected how many days and nights Ben-