his only son. Alston had rebelled, then
had given in for a time, and gone into Wall Street. Instead of proving
his unfitness for a career he loathed, he showed a marked aptitude for
business, inherited no doubt from his father. He could do well what he
hated doing. This fact accentuated his father's wrath when he abruptly
threw up business and finally decided that he would be a singer or
nothing. The Wall Street magnate stopped all supplies. Then Crayford
took Alston up. For three years Alston had lived on the impresario's
charity in Paris. Was it matter for wonder if he set his teeth and
resolved to win out? He had in him the grit of young America, that
intensity of life which sweeps through veins like a tide.

"Father's going to see presently," he often said to himself. "He's just
got to, and that's all there is to it."

This young man was almost as a weapon in Charmian's hand.

He was charming, and specially charming in his enthusiasm. He had the
American readiness to meet others half way, the American lack of
shyness. Despite the iron of his will, the fierceness of his young
determination, he was often naive almost as a schoolboy. The evil of
Paris had swirled about him and had left him unstained by its blackness.
He was no fool. He was certainly not ignorant of life. But he preserved
intact a delightful freshness that often seemed to partake of innocence.

And he worked, as he expressed it, "like the devil."

Charmian, genuinely liking him, but also seeing his possibilities as a
lever, or weapon, was delightful to him. Claude also took to him at
once. The song seemed to link them all together happily. Very soon
Alston was almost as one of the Heath family. He came perpetually to the
studio to "try things over." He brought various American friends there.
He ate improvised meals there at odd times, Charmian acting as cook. He
had even slept there more than once, when they had been making, music
very late. And Charmian had had a bed put on the platform behind the
screen, and called it "the Prophet's chamber."

This young and determined enthusiast had a power of flooding others
with his atmosphere. He flooded Claude with it. And his ambition made
his atmosphere what it was. Here was another who meant to "produce the
goods."

Never before had Claude come closely in contact with the vigor, with the
sharply cut ideals, of the new world. He began to see many things in a
new way, to see some things which he had never