ith a full moon shining down upon
the deserted squares. We went up the hill and stood on the steps of the
academy, then sat down upon a bench on the playground beneath the
poplars, and found our initials there where we had cut them years
before. Missing Dart in these old familiar places, it was natural for us
to talk of him, for, well as Jack loved me, Harry was his dearest
friend. A peculiar tenderness had always knit their hearts together, and
it had been another sorrow to Holt that in all his trouble his cousin
was too far away to give him a glance of his eyes, a grip of his strong
hand.

I told him all I knew of Harry. We had not been mistaken in our estimate
of his genius: he had not been in Rome three months before the famous
Z----had become interested in him and allowed him to study in his
atelier. Every one predicted success for the young artist, and dealers
were already beginning to buy up his pictures, paying a mere song for
studies to-day which years hence they expected to sell for a big sum on
the strength of the reputation he would have gained. Harry's strong
points were his unequalled distinctness of vision and his intensity of
feeling for art. He put a passionate throb into every movement of his
brush. When once an idea occurred to him as desirable to work out, it
defined itself to his imagination with a reality, a power, an amplitude
of detail, which blinded him for the time being to everything else, and
he worked so faithfully that he stamped his conception and his meaning
upon not only every figure, but every accessory of his picture; so that
the most commonplace observer gazed at his canvas with some of the same
feeling with which he gazed at an experience of life. But Z---- was not
yet satisfied to have him attempt compositions, and he was spending much
time over the curious processes by which the perfection of skill in art
is attained--productive analyses of coloring, light, shadow and the
mellowed harmonies of time-worn pictures.

"We shall be proud of Harry by and by," said Holt as I paused. "I hope
he won't stay too long abroad. I have missed you so, Floyd!" And we fell
to telling stories of our boyhood, and again and again Jack's laugh
broke the silence of the night, for there were droll tales to tell. We
heard the chimes of midnight before we stirred from our seat, and then
we moved with some reluctance, for the moonlight was rare, and the light
upon the water where the sea-line showed through