ss. He
bethought himself of something he had read about "sitting by the hearth
and remembering the faces of women without desire," and felt himself an
octogenarian.

He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his
brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he
had wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He
had sat there in the box while his brother and Katharine were called
back again and again after the last number, watching the roses go up
over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano,
brooding, in his sullen boy's heart, upon the pride those two felt in
each other's work--spurring each other to their best and beautifully
contending in song. The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering line
drawn sharply between their life and his; a circle of flame set about
those splendid children of genius. He walked back to his hotel alone
and sat in his window staring out on Madison Square until long after
midnight, resolving to beat no more at doors that he could never enter
and realizing more keenly than ever before how far this glorious world
of beautiful creations lay from the paths of men like himself. He told
himself that he had in common with this woman only the baser uses of
life.

Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of
release except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days of
the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging
him to hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his
business engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's
ponies, or fishing in the mountains, and in the evenings he sat in his
room writing letters or reading. In the afternoon he was usually at his
post of duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions
about the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the
compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played
the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a
stopgap all his life. He remembered going through a looking glass
labyrinth when he was a boy and trying gallery after gallery, only at
every turn to bump his nose against his own face--which, indeed, was not
his own, but his brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west,
by land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's
business, one of the tributary lives w