ivilization had ever fashioned to its ends of
disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness,
for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst
had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished face
in affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue
dressing-gown in a large house of a quiet London suburb. For three
years, after leaving school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with
the elder Heyst, who was then writing his last book. In this work, at
the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral
and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.

Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age
were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The young
man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning
of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great
achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the
pitiless cold blasts of the father's analysis had blown away from the
son.

"I'll drift," Heyst had said to himself deliberately.

He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally. He meant
to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf
drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable trees of a forest
glade; to drift without ever catching on to anything.

"This shall be my defence against life," he had said to himself with a
sort of inward consciousness that for the son of his father there was no
other worthy alternative.

He became a waif and stray, austerely, from conviction, as others
do through drink, from vice, from some weakness of character--with
deliberation, as others do in despair. This, stripped of its facts, had
been Heyst's life up to that disturbing night. Next day, when he saw the
girl called Alma, she managed to give him a glance of frank tenderness,
quick as lightning and leaving a profound impression, a secret touch on
the heart. It was in the grounds of the hotel, about tiffin time, while
the Ladies of the orchestra were strolling back to their pavilion after
rehearsal, or practice, or whatever they called their morning musical
exercises in the hall. Heyst, returning from the town, where he had
discovered that there would be difficulties in the way of getting away
at once, was crossing the compound, disappointed and worried. He had
walked almost unwittingly