He drained his bumper slowly, and made no attempt to relieve the awkward silence that sat upon the company.
Truth to tell, there was emotion enough in the soul of him who was wont to be the life of every board he sat at to hold him silent and even moody.
Here, after eighteen years, was he again in his ancestral home of Marleigh.

But how was he returned?
As one who came under a feigned name, to seek from usurping hands a shelter 'neath his own roof; a beggar of that from others which it should have been his to grant or to deny those others.

As an avenger he came.

For justice he came, and armed with retribution; the flame of a hate unspeakable burning in his heart, and demanding the lives--no less--of those that had destroyed him and his.
Yet was he forced to sit a mendicant almost at that board whose head was his by every right; forced to sit and curb his mood, giving no outward sign of the volcano that boiled and raged within his soul as his eye fell upon the florid, smiling face and portly, well-fed frame of Gregory Ashburn.

For the time was not yet.