smoke, suddenly sprang a bomb. "Have you ever composed, Mr.
Douglass, written any songs, for instance? I have heard that you range
men have an aptitude in that direction."

Douglass surveyed him levelly for a moment, his face hardening with
quick suspicion. "I have done most things foolish, after the manner of
my kind, Mr. Brevoort," he said, curtly; "but I hardly think you would
find even a passing interest in anything I have accomplished in that
direction." Whereupon that astute financier subsided promptly, evincing
no further curiosity as to the poetic attainments of this uncomfortably
straight-speaking young personage. He was a very shrewd man and had long
since learned to respect the moods and idiosyncrasies of others.

But Constance, his wife, detecting the sharp irritation in Douglass's
voice, was seized with a malicious desire to know its cause; like her
husband she was thinking: "That caught him on the raw, somehow. I wonder
why?"

"You should allow your friends to be the judge of that, Mr. Douglass,"
she said, pleasantly. "I am quite certain myself that we should find
much more than a passing interest if we could induce you to favor us.
The songs inspired by this environment must naturally be full of color
and strength. I should very much enjoy hearing one."

"Upon your heads be it, then!" He seated himself at the piano. "This,"
he said, turning to Mrs. Brevoort, meaningly, "I call 'The Song of the
Wolf.'"

Through the silence of the room crept a queer, faint murmur like the
breath of an aeolian harp or the sighing of the wind through far-off
pines. There was no attempt at harmonious arrangement and concordance;
it was rather a vague, erratic and intangible dissonance, a weird jumble
of soft discords that alternately pleased and pained. Gradually it
increased in volume, as the wind rises to the approach of a storm,
culminating finally in a thunderous crash of double bass. Then out of
the contrastive silence of the succeeding lull came unmistakably the
mournful howl of a wolf, wonderfully rendered by a few soft tremulous
touches of those strong yet sensitive fingers.

Another rolling crash, a diminishing rumble, and then the rich, deep
voice of the singer:

"Child of the Wind and Sun, I glide
Like a tongue of flame o'er the mountain's side.
Wherever falleth my blighting tread
Lie the whitening bones of the silent Dead.
For trail of wrath
Is my red-wet path