Robert Fairchild picked it up, and with a sigh restored it to the grim, fumed oak case.

His days of petty sacrifices that his father might while away the weary hours with reading were over.
Memories! They were all about him, in the grate with its blackened coals, the old-fashioned pictures on the walls, the almost gloomy rooms, the big chair by the window, and yet they told him nothing except that a white-haired, patient, lovable old man was gone,--a man whom he was wont to call "father." And in that going, the slow procedure of an unnatural existence had snapped for Robert Fairchild.
As he roamed about in his loneliness, he wondered what he would do now, where he could go; to whom he could talk.

He had worked since sixteen, and since sixteen there had been few times when he had not come home regularly each night, to wait upon the white-haired man in the big chair, to discern his wants instinctively, and to sit with him, often in silence, until the old onyx clock on the mantel had clanged eleven; it had been the same program, day, week, month and year.

And now Robert Fairchild was as a person lost.

The ordinary pleasures of youth had never been his; he could not turn to them with any sort of grace.
The years of servitude to a beloved master had inculcated within him the feeling of self-impelled sacrifice; he had forgotten all thought of personal pleasures for their sake alone.