y
impersonal, little more than appreciations of sorrow as a factor in that
mystic equation to the solving of which he had bent all his intellect.

On the other hand he was fired by a passionate desire to aid; nor when
occasion had arisen had he hesitated to sacrifice self for another's
good. But such altruism was born of impulse and never considered. The
spectacle of the universe absorbed him, and listening for the
Pythagorean music of the spheres he sometimes became deaf to the voices
of those puny lives about him. His attention being called to them,
however, his solicitude was sweet and sincere, but once removed from his
purview they were also dismissed from his mind; and because of his
irresistible charm there were some who wept to be so soon forgotten. His
intellect was patrician--almost deiform in the old Roman sense.
Probably all great masters have been similarly endowed, for if in order
that one shall successfully conduct a military campaign he must think in
armies and not in squads, so, if another would aspire to guide Thought,
presumably must he think in continents. It does not follow that he shall
lack genius for love and friendship, but merely that he cannot distract
his mind in seeking out individual sorrows. The physician tends the
hurts of the body, the priest ministers to the ills of the spirit; Paul
Mario yearned to heal the wounds of a stricken world.

But Flamby interested him keenly, and therefore he draped her in a
mantle of poesy, obscuring those shades displeasing to his
sensibilities; as, an occasional coarseness due to association with her
father; and enhancing her charms and accomplishments. Her beauty and
spirit delighted the aesthete, and her mystery enthralled the poet. She
had feared Sir Jacques. Why? Paul toyed with the question in his own
fashion and made of Hatton Towers a feudal keep and of his deceased
uncle a baron of unsavoury repute. The maid Flamby, so called because
men had likened the glory of her hair to a waving flambeau, he caused to
reside in a tiny cottage beneath the very shadow of Sir Jacques'
frowning fortress; and the men-at-arms looking down from battlement and
bartizan marvelled when the morning wove a halo around the head of the
witch's daughter. (In the poem-picture which grew thus in his mind as he
swung along towards Hatton, Mrs. Duveen had become even more shrivelled
than nature had made her; her eyes had grown brighter and her earrings
longer).

Word of the mai