Had he had children? Monk thought not. There were none he could recall. In a sense Monk himself had been son to him, the young man he had nurtured and taught, to whom he had passed on his knowledge, his love of fine things, of arts and pleasures, good books, good food, good wine, good clothes. Monk remembered something of a beautiful desk, wood like silk, shining, inlaid, a depth to the color like light through a goblet of brandy.

He had a sudden sharp vision of himself standing before the looking glass in a tailor’s rooms, younger, thinner in the shoulders and chest, and Dundas behind him, his face so clear the tiny lines in the skin around his eyes were etched sharply, telling of years of squinting against the light, and quick laughter.

“For heaven’s sake, stand up straight!” he had said. “And change that cravat! Tie it properly. You look like a popinjay!”

Monk had felt crushed. He had thought it rather stylish.

He knew later that Dundas was right. He was always right in matters of taste. Monk had absorbed it like blotting paper, taking a blurred but recognizable print of his mentor.

What had happened to Dundas’s money? If he had been found guilty of fraud, there must have been a profit somewhere. Had he spent it, perhaps on fine clothes, pictures, wine? Or had it been confiscated? Monk had no idea.

He breasted the rise, and the panorama that spread out in front of him took his breath away. Fields and moorlands stretched to the farther hills five or six miles distant and around the curve of the escarpment on which he sat. The unfinished track snaked over farmland and open tussock toward the sudden dip of a stream and an adjoining marshy stretch across which spanned the incomplete arches of a viaduct. When it was finished it would be over a mile long. It was a thing of extraordinary beauty. The sheer engineering skill of it filled him with a sense of exhilaration, almost spiritual uplift at the possibilities of man and the certainty in his own mind of what it would be when the last tie was driven in. The great iron engines with more power than hundreds of horses would carry tons of goods or scores of people at breakneck speeds from city to city without resting. It was a marvelous, complicated beauty of strength, the force of nature harnessed by the genius of man to serve the future.

He remembered his own words: “It’ll be on time!” He could see Dundas’s face as clearly as if he had been there, hair a little windblown, skin burned, narrowing his eyes against the light. Monk was stung by loneliness that there was nothing but miles of empty grass rippling over the long curve toward the valley, broken by a few wildflowers, white and gold in the green.