entrancing scene.

The birds, twittering in the fruit-trees and over the vines, had the
air of an orchestra, the concerts of the season over, gathering their
instruments and about to depart. One could detect in the lapse of the
waves along the shore the note of weariness preceding the change into
the fretfulness and the tumult of tempests. In the soft ripening of the
season there was peace and hope, but it was the hope of another day. The
curtain was falling on this.

Was life beginning, then, or ending? If life only could change and renew
itself like the seasons, with the perpetually recurring springs! But
youth comes only once, and thereafter the man gathers the fruit of it,
sweet or bitter.

Jack was not given to moralizing, but perhaps a subtle suggestion of
this came to him in the thought that an enterprise, a new enterprise,
might have seemed easier in May, when the forces of nature were with
him, than in October. There was something, at least, that fell in with
his mood, a mood of acquiescence in failure, in this closing season of
the year, when he stood empty-handed in the harvest-time.

"Edith," he said, as they paced down the walk which was flaming with
scarlet and crimson borders, and turned to look at the peaceful brown
house, "I hate to go."

"But you are not going," said Edith, brightly. "I feel all the time as
if you were just coming back. Jack, do you know," and she put her hand
on his shoulder, "this is the sweetest home in the world now!"

"It is the only one, dear;" and Jack made the statement with a humorous
sense of its truth. "Well, there's the train, and I'm off with the other
clerks."

"Clerk, indeed!" cried Edith, putting up her face to his; "you are going
to be a Merchant Prince, Jack, that is what you are going to be."

On the train there was an atmosphere of business. Jack felt that he was
not going to the New York that he knew--not to his New York, but to a
city of traffic; down into the streets of commercial enterprise, not at
all to the metropolis of leisure, of pleasure, to the world of clubs and
drawing-rooms and elegant loiterings and the rivalries of society life.
That was all ended. Jack was hurrying to catch the down-town car for the
dingy office of Fletcher & Co. at an hour fixed.

It was ended, to be sure, but the struggle with Jack in his new life was
not ended, his biographer knows, for months and years.

It was long before he could pass his club windows without a pang