ran down the lines of the
announcement. When he had found what he sought, he lit a cigar, paying
no attention to the boards, but studying the audience with cursory
interest until the appearance of Betsy, the Hyacinth Girl.

When she began to sing, his mind still wandered. The words of her song
were crude, but not without a certain lilt that delighted the uncultured
ear, while the girl's voice was thin to the point of being unpleasant.
When, however, she came to the burden of the song, Clarke's manner
changed suddenly. Laying down his cigar, he listened with rapt
attention, eagerly gazing at her. For, as she sang the last line and
tore the hyacinth-blossoms from her hair, there crept into her voice a
strangely poignant, pathetic little thrill, that redeemed the execrable
faultiness of her singing, and brought the rude audience under her
spell.

Clarke, too, was captivated by that tremour, the infinite sadness of
which suggested the plaint of souls moaning low at night, when lust
preys on creatures marked for its spoil.

The singer paused. Still those luminous eyes were upon her. She grew
nervous. It was only with tremendous difficulty that she reached the
refrain. As she sang the opening lines of the last stanza, an
inscrutable smile curled on Clarke's lips. She noticed the man's
relentless gaze and faltered. When the burden came, her singing was hard
and cracked: the tremour had gone from her voice.

III

Long before the appointed time Ernest walked up and down in front of the
abode of Reginald Clarke, a stately apartment-house overlooking
Riverside Drive.

Misshapen automobiles were chasing by, carrying to the cool river's
marge the restlessness and the fever of American life. But the bustle
and the noise seemed to the boy only auspicious omens of the future.

Jack, his room-mate and dearest friend, had left him a month ago, and,
for a space, he had felt very lonely. His young and delicate soul found
it difficult to grapple with the vague fears that his nervous brain
engendered, when whispered sounds seemed to float from hidden corners,
and the stairs creaked under mysterious feet.

He needed the voice of loving kindness to call him back from the valley
of haunting shadows, where his poet's soul was wont to linger overlong;
in his hours of weakness the light caress of a comrade renewed his
strength and rekindled in his hand the flaming sword of song.

And at nightfall he would bring the day's harves