finite tenderness, a great longing, a sweetness of distant and
remembered joy. It seemed to be singing over again the favourite song
of some one who had died--singing very clearly and distinctly so as
not to lose a single note, a single movement, of the unforgotten
melody of happiness.

The delicate dusk of a May evening gathered slowly in the room. The
windows were wide open. In the narrow, curving street below, already
half-deserted, a young man who was passing with long aimless steps, as
if he felt that he must be going somewhere but did not know exactly
where, stopped suddenly when he heard the music above him, and stood
listening until its last note trembled into silence. Then he strode
away, but in the opposite direction, as if he had changed his mind.

II

The path that had led Richard Shafer into the Rue de Grenelle and
under the windows of Carola Brune without knowing it, was long and
roundabout, and in places rather rough. It was one of the by-ways of
the unknown quantity.

To him, from the first, the thought of the perfect summer had been
like something that he had lost and would never find again. It made
him dissatisfied, fickle, and resentful. He went back to his college
work with a temper which handicapped him in everything. His lessons
seemed like the dullest drudgery to one who felt sure that he had in
him the making of a poet or a musician, he did not quite know
which--perhaps it was both. The fellowship of the other boys, with its
rude and hearty democracy, streaked with funny little social
prejudices and ambitions, was a thing of which he could not or would
not learn the secret.

He tried running with the literary set. But Shorty Burke, who was the
acknowledged college genius, said of him, "Shafer seems to think that
he's the only man since Keats, and all the rest of us are duffers."

He tried running with the fast set. But Duke Jones, who could carry
more strong liquors than any man in the crowd, said of him, "Dick is
no good; when he goes to town with us he's a thousand miles away, and
every glass makes him more stuck-up and quarrelsome."

He tried running with the purely social set, the arbiters of college
elegance. But it bored him immensely, and he took no pains to conceal
it, so they silently cast him out.

The consequence of all this was that he failed to get into any of the
upper-class societies, and consoled himself with the belief that he
was terribly in love with a girl three ye