sparkle and shine of his splendid presence dimmed by Randy's radiance.

"I hate to say that he is--charming," Cope complained.

He was a good sport, and he wanted Becky to be happy. But it was not
easy to sit there and see those two--with the pendulum swinging between
them of joy and dreams, and the knowledge of a long life together.

"Why should it be?" he asked Louise, as he stood beside her, later, on
their own little porch which overlooked the sea; "those two--did you see
them? While I----"

Louise laid her hand on his shoulder. "Yes. I think it is something like
this, Arch. They've got to live it out, and life isn't always going to
be just to-night for them. And perhaps in the years together they may
lose some of their dreams. They've got to grow old, and you, you'll go
out--with all--your dreams----"

He reached up and took the kind hand.

"'They all go out like this--into the night--but what a fleet
of--stars.' Is that it, Louise?"

"Yes."

The clearness of the moonlight was broken by long fingers of fog
stretched up from the horizon.

"I'll wrap up and sit here, Louise," Archibald said; "I shan't sleep if
I go in."

"Don't stay too long. Good-night, my dear, good-night."

Archibald, watching the fog shut out the moonlight, had still upon him
that sense of revolt. Fame had never come to him, and love had come too
late.

Yet for Randy there was to be fulfillment--the wife of his heart, the
applause of the world. What did it all mean? Why should one man have
all, and the other--nothing?

Yet he had had his dreams. And the dreams of men lived. That which died
was the least of them. The great old gods of democracy--Washington,
Jefferson, Adams--had seen visions, and the visions had endured. Only
yesterday Roosevelt had proclaimed his gallant doctrines. He had died
proclaiming them, and the world held its head higher, because of his
belief in its essential rightness.

The mists enveloped Archibald in a sort of woolly dampness. He saw for a
moment a dim and distant moon. If he could have painted a moon like
that--with fingers of fog reaching up to it----!

His own dreams of beauty? What of them? His pictures would not live. He
knew that now. But he had given more than pictures to the world. He had
given himself in a crusade which had been born of high idealism and a
sense of brotherhood. Day after day, night after night, his plane had
hung, poised like an eagle, above the enemy. He had been one of th