The
gentlemen would not stay behind the ladies, even for the sake of the
well-known wine. So the moody host, notwithstanding his hospitality,
was left alone at the table in the great silent room. We followed the
company upstairs to the drawing-room, and thence to the nursery for
snap-dragon; but while they were busy with this most shadowy of games,
nearly all the Shadows crept downstairs again to the dining-room, where
the old man still sat, gnawing the bone of his own selfishness. They
crowded into the room, and by using every kind of expansion--blowing
themselves out like soap-bubbles--they succeeded in heaping up the
whole room with shade upon shade. They clustered thickest about the
fire and the lamp, till at last they almost drowned them in hills of
darkness.
"Before they had accomplished so much, the children, tired with fun and
frolic, had been put to bed. But the little girl of five years old,
with whom we had been so pleased when first we arrived, could not go to
sleep. She had a little room of her own; and I had watched her to bed,
and now kept her awake by gambolling in the rays of the night-light.
When her eyes were once fixed upon me, I took the shape of her
grandfather, representing him on the wall as he sat in his chair, with
his head bent down and his arms hanging listlessly by his sides. And
the child remembered that that was just as she had seen him last; for
she had happened to peep in at the dining-room door after all the rest
had gone upstairs.
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