n Adriance, and much
heavier. His face was of the same oval mould, but it was grey, and
darkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the same
inconstant April colour, but they were reflective and rather dull; while
Adriance's were always points of high light, and always meaning another
thing than the thing they meant yesterday. It was hard to see why this
earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face, as
gay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder,
and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of
twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into
words. A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and
of her affections, once said that the shepherd-boys who sang in the Vale
of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde.

Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that night,
the victim of mournful recollections. His infatuation for Katharine
Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyish
love-affairs. The fact that it was all so done and dead and far behind
him, and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him an
oppressive sense of age and loss.

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 Katherine were called back again
and again, and the flowers went 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.
He walked back to his hotel alone, and sat in his window staring out on
Madison Square until long after midnight, resolved to beat no more at
doors that he could never enter.

* * * * *

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 Ch