o gallery through the dazzle of
afternoon light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in their
half-forgotten splendour, filling his soul with the long echoes of
beauty. After all, his life had been too starved....

Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself saying: "But
I'm only fifty-seven--" and then he turned away. For such summer
dreams it was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest of
friendship, of comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.

He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were to meet; and
together they walked again across the Place de la Concorde and over the
bridge that leads to the Chamber of Deputies.

Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his father's mind, was
talking excitedly and abundantly of Versailles. He had had but one
previous glimpse of it, during a holiday trip in which he had tried to
pack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to go with
the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-sure
criticism tripped each other up on his lips.

As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness
increased. The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the
facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a
master but as an equal. "That's it: they feel equal to things--they
know their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman
of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and
with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.

Suddenly Dallas stopped short, grasping his father's arm. "Oh, by
Jove," he exclaimed.

They had come out into the great tree-planted space before the
Invalides. The dome of Mansart floated ethereally above the budding
trees and the long grey front of the building: drawing up into itself
all the rays of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol
of the race's glory.

Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of the
avenues radiating from the Invalides; and he had pictured the quarter
as quiet and almost obscure, forgetting the central splendour that lit
it up. Now, by some queer process of association, that golden light
became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived. For
nearly thirty years, her life--of which he knew so strangely
little--had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to
be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs. He thought of the
theatres sh