The Dweller on the Threshold

"And you have 'placed' them all?"

"I thought I had, I thought so--but--"

Mr. Harding was silent. Then, with a strange abruptness, and the air of a man forced into an action against which something within him protested, he said:

"Mr. Malling, you are the only person I know who, having been acquainted with Henry Chichester, has at last met him again after a prolonged interval of separation. Two years, you said. People who see a man from day to day observe very little or nothing. Changes occur and are not noticed by them. A man and his wife live together and grow old. But does either ever notice when the face of the other begins first to lose its bloom, to take on that peculiar, unmistakable stamp that the passage of the years sets on us all? Few of us really see what is always before us. But the man who comes back--he sees. Tell me the honest truth, I beg of you. Do you or do you not, see a great change in Henry Chichester?"