g over its futilities, or guiltily losing himself in
the life of books. What he really loved was music and the arts, and he
dearly liked to read about the people who had leisure to follow such
lures, time to be emotional even, and indulge in pretty talk. Yet law
was the giant he had undertaken to wrestle with, and he kept his grip.
Sometime, he thought, the cases would be all tried or the feet of
litigants would seek other doors. The wave of middle age would toss him
to an island of leisure, and there he would sit down and hear music and
read long books.

As he saw Anne coming down the stairs, he thought of music personified.
A crowd of adjectives rose in his mind and, like attendant graces,
grouped themselves about her. He could imagine her sitting at archaic
instruments, calling out of them, with slim fingers, diaphanous
melodies. Yet the beauty that surrounded her like a light mantle she had
snatched up from nature to wear about her always, did not displace the
other vision of beauty in his heart. It did not even jostle it. Esther
Blake was, he knew, the sum of the ineffable feminine.

While he made that little explanation of his haste in coming and his
fear that it was an untoward time, Anne heard him with a faint smile,
all her listening in her upturned face. She was grateful to him. Her
father, she knew, would be the stronger for men's hands to hold him up.
She returned a little explanation. Father was so tired. He had gone to
bed. Then it seemed to her that Choate did a thing unsurpassed in
splendour.

"You are one of the daughters, aren't you?" he said.

"Yes," she answered. "I'm Anne."

Mary Nellen had delivered the candle to her hand, and she stood there
holding it in a serious manner, as if it lighted some ceremonial. Then
it was that Choate made the speech that clinched his hold upon her
heart.

"When do you expect your brother?"

Anne's face flooded. He was not acting as if Jeff, coming from an
unspeakable place, mustn't be mentioned. He was asking exactly as if
Jeff had been abroad and the ship was almost in. It was like a pilot
boat going out to see that he got in safely. And feeling the
circumstance greatly, she found herself answering with a slow
seriousness which did, indeed, carry much dignity.

"We are not sure. We think he may come directly through; but, on the
other hand, he may be tired and not feel up to it."

Choate smiled his irregular, queer smile. He was turning away now.

"Tell