t uncomprehending child. At the sight of
his smiling, wrinkled face, his gentle blue eyes and the wistful droop
of disappointment at the corners of his mouth, her indignation changed
suddenly to pity. It seemed to her that she saw all his eighty years
looking at her from that furrowed face out of those little wandering
round blue eyes--saw the human part of him as she had never seen it
before--with its patience of unfulfilment, its scant small pleasures,
its innocent senile passion at the end; saw, too, the divine part,
hidden in him as in all humanity--that communion of longing which bound
his passionate fluting, Angela's passionate remorse and her own
passionate purity into the universal congregation of unsatisfied souls.

The sharp words died upon her lips and, kneeling at his side, she took
his shrivelled little hands into her warm, comforting clasp. "Dear Uncle
Percival, I understand, and I love you," she said.

CHAPTER IV

USHERS IN THE MODERN SPIRIT

"So you have seen her," Adams had remarked the same afternoon, as he
walked with Trent in the direction of Broadway. "Do you walk up, by the
way? I always manage to get in a bit of exercise at this hour."

As Trent fell in with his companion's rapid step, he seemed to be moving
in a fine golden glow of enthusiasm. A light icy drizzle had turned the
snow upon the pavement into sloppy puddles of water, but to the young
man, fresh from his inexperience, the hour and the scene alike were of
exhilarating promise.

"I feel as if I had been breathing different air!" he exclaimed, without
replying directly to the question. "And yet how simple she is--how
utterly unlike the resplendent Mrs. Bridewell--"

He stopped breathlessly, overcome by his excitement, and Adams took up
the unfinished sentence almost tenderly. "So far, of course, she is
merely a beautiful promise, a flower in the bud," he said. "Her
genius--if she has genius--has not found itself, and the notes she
strikes are all mere groping attempts at a perfect self-expression. Yet,
undoubtedly, she has done a few fine things," he admitted with
professional caution.

"But if, as you say, her emotional self does not go into her poems, what
becomes of it?" enquired Trent, with a curiosity too impersonal to be
vulgar. "For she, finely tempered as she is, suggests nothing so much as
a beautiful golden flame."

Adams started, and flashed upon the other a glance as incisive as a
search-light.

"Then you