Carew came
back from the Club, flowed and quavered and echoed sweetly through the
room. In the twilight, before the gas came, with old-fashioned stars set
in the candelabra, the touching pathos of the ballads spoke to the
romantic Fairfax ... spoke to his twenty-three years and spoke
dangerously. He became more and more chivalrous and considered his aunt
a misunderstood and unloved woman. Long, long afterwards, a chord, a
note, was sufficient to bring before him the square drawing-room with
its columns, furnish with an agglomeration of gaudy, rich, fantastic
things expressive of her uncertain taste. He saw again the long dark
piano and the silhouette of the woman behind it, graceful, shadowy, and
felt the pressure against his arm of little Gardiner, as they two sat
sympathetically lifted to an emotional pitch, stirred as only the music
of a woman's voice in love-songs can stir a man's heart.

Bella came back and there was an end of the concerts. A charm to keep
Bella silent had not yet been found, unless that charm were a book. "She
could not read when mother sang," she said, "and more than that, it
made her cry." And when Mr. Carew's latchkey scratched in the door,
Bella flew upstairs to the top story, Antony and Gardiner followed more
slowly; Mrs. Carew shut her piano, and took the cars again to forget her
restlessness in the purchase of silks and dry goods and house
decorations, and was far from guessing the emotion she had aroused in
the breast of her nephew--"Flow gently, sweet Afton." Nothing flowed
gently in Fairfax's impetuous breast. Nothing flowed gently on the tide
of events that drifted past slowly, leaving him unsuccessful, without
any opening into fame.

CHAPTER XI

Cedersholm returned to New York and Fairfax presented himself again at
the studio, getting as far as the workroom of the great Swede who had
started in life the son of a tinsmith in Copenhagen. The smell of the
clay, the sight of the figures swathed in damp cloths, the shaded light,
struck Fairfax deliciously as he waited for an audience with Cedersholm.
Fairfax drew his breath deep as though he were once again in his
element. Cedersholm was out, and with no other encouragement than the
sight of the interior of the four walls, Antony was turned away. His
mother had added to his fast melting funds by a birthday gift, and
Fairfax was nearly at the end of this.

Walking up from Cedersholm's to his uncle's house, a tramp of three
miles