ce of others' passion. He walked back to Burton's rather
pensively, and got up to his room and went to bed after as little stay
for talk with his hosts as he could make decent; he did not like to
break with his melancholy.

He was roused from his first sleep by the sound of singing, which
seemed to stop with his waking. There came a confused murmur of girls'
and young men's voices, and Ludlow could see from his open window the
dim shapes of the serenaders in the dark of the trees below. Then they
were still, and all at once the silence was filled with a rich
contralto note, carrying the song, till the whole choir of voices took
up the burden. Nothing prettier could have happened anywhere in the
world. Ludlow hung rapt upon the music till Burton flung up his window,
as if to thank the singers. They stopped at the sound, and with gay
shouts and shrieks, and a medley of wild laughter, skurried away into
the farther darkness, where Ludlow heard them begin their serenade
again under distant windows as little localized as any space of the
sky.

VI.

Ludlow went back to New York and took up his work with vigor and with
fervor. The picture of the County Fair, which he exhibited at the
American Artists', ran a gauntlet of criticism in which it was
belabored at once for its unimaginative vulgarity and its fantastic
unreality; then it returned to his studio and remained unsold, while
the days, weeks, months and years went by and left each their fine
trace on him. His purposes dropped away, mostly unfulfilled, as he grew
older and wiser, but his dreams remained and he was still rich in a
vast future. His impressionism was somewhat modified; he offered his
palette less frequently to the public; he now and then permitted a
black object to appear in his pictures; his purples and greens were
less aggressive. His moustache had grown so thick that it could no
longer be brushed up at the points with just the effect he desired, and
he suffered it to branch straight across his cheeks; his little dot of
an imperial had become lost in the beard which he wore so
conscientiously trimmed to a point that it might be described as
religiously pointed. He was now twenty-seven.

At sixteen Cornelia Saunders had her first love-affair. It was with a
young man who sold what he called art-goods by sample--satin banners,
gilt rolling-pins, brass disks and keramics; he had permitted himself
to speak to her on the train coming over from the Jun