golden sunlight falling the length of the street was
already darkling with the faded day. A warm glow enveloped the brick
facades and the window panes of aged, faintly iridescent glass; there
was a remote sound of automobile horns, the illusive murmur of a city
never, at its loudest, loud; and, through the walls, the notes of a
piano, charming and melancholy.

After a little he could distinguish the air--it was Liszt's
Spanish Rhapsody. The accent of its measure, the jota, was at once
perceptible and immaterial; and overwhelmingly, through its magic
of suggestion, a blinding vision of his own youth--so different from
Howard's--swept over Charles Abbott. It was exactly as though, again
twenty-three, he were standing in the incandescent sunlight of Havana;
in, to be precise, the Parque Isabel. This happened so suddenly, so
surprisingly, that it oppressed his heart; he breathed with a
sharpness which resembled a gasp; the actuality around him was
blurred as though his eyes were slightly dazzled.

The playing continued intermittently, while its power to stir him grew
in an overwhelming volume. He had had no idea that he was still
capable of such profound feeling, such emotion spun, apparently, from
the tunes only potent with the young. He was confused--even, alone,
embarrassed--at the tightness of his throat, and made a decided effort
to regain a reasonable mind. He turned again to the consideration of
Howard Gage, of his lack of ideals; and, still in the flood of the
re-created past, he saw, in the difference between Howard and the boy
in Havana, what, for himself anyhow, was the trouble with the
present.

Yes, his premonition had been right--the youth of today were without
the high and romantic causes the service of which had so brightly
colored his own early years. Not patriotism alone but love had
suffered; and friendship, he was certain, had all but disappeared;
such friendship as had bound him to Andres Escobar. Andres! Charles
Abbott hadn't thought of him consciously for months. Now, with the
refrain of the piano, the jota, running through his thoughts, Andres
was as real as he had been forty years ago.

It was forty years almost to the month since they had gone to the
public ball, the danzon, in the Tacon Theatre. That, however, was at
the close of the period which had recurred to him like a flare in the
dusk of the past. After the danzon the blaze of his sheer fervency had
been reduced, cooled, to maturity. B