take the place of
mere mundane sensation. Whether his passion for Silvia grew out of their
music, or the wonder of the music was a result of the perfect accord of
their natures, he could not tell. They had become one in his mind.

He fervently hated her various public activities. Here again the
ancestral traits dominated. He thought of her as a great lady, and being
that, she should have been content without anything more. Rushing madly
about doing things for other people implied a certain loss of caste. But
until the previous evening his discontent had been free from the bitter
draught of jealousy. There had been safety in the number of Miss
Holland's admirers, and when he was surest that she did not in any way
return his feeling for her, there had been balm in the thought that she
was too busy elevating the condition of her own sex to have much time to
waste upon any member of his. Instinctively he knew, when he intercepted
the first look between the lady of his dreams and his erstwhile college
associate, that the hour had come that he had dreaded. Silvia Holland
had at last met a man whom, consciously or unconsciously, she
acknowledged king. His rival was there, upon the threshold of her life,
and he was a rival to be feared. That he might also be a rival in his
profession, that he was so rich that he was far above the straits in
which Morris found himself more and more frequently involved, only added
to the flame that consumed him; life without Silvia herself would be
dull, colorless, objectless; life without her music would be but "wind
along the waste."

He had no patience with the theories of the newer medical practitioners
who refuse to be frightened by the cry of "professional ethics" or by
the demand that practice shall be "regular" whether the patient survives
or not; and yet while he denounced all forms of mental therapeutics, he
was conscious of a strain of superstition which he could in no wise
overcome. Weird folk-lore and uncanny rites kept up by some of the
primitive people of Hungary had had a strange fascination for him when
he was abroad. In himself, he found a singular mixture of the primeval
savage, and the ultra refined that approaches decadence. Of one thing
alone he was certain. To lose Silvia was to lose his soul; without her
there was neither here nor hereafter. Ruthlessly as he had brushed aside
the one woman in his life who came between them, he was prepared to
thrust out of his way any ma