close air of the house, he sat on the narrow, dusty front porch and
looked about him at his neighbors. The street had once been smart and
aspiring, but it had fallen into decay and dejection. Pale young men,
with flurried-looking wives, seemed to Boyce to occupy most of the
houses. Sometimes three or four couples would live in one house. Most of
these appeared to be childless. The women made a pretence at fashionable
dressing, and wore their hair elaborately in fashions which somehow
suggested boarding-houses to Boyce, though he could not have told why.
Every house in the block needed fresh paint. Lacking this renovation,
the householders tried to make up for it by a display of lace curtains
which, at every window, swayed in the smoke-weighted breeze. Strips
of carpeting were laid down the front steps of the houses where the
communities of young couples lived, and here, evenings, the inmates of
the houses gathered, committing mild extravagances such as the treating
of each other to ginger ale, or beer, or ice-cream.

Boyce watched these tawdry makeshifts at sociability with bitterness and
loathing. He wondered how he could have been such a fool as to bring
his exquisite Babette to this neighborhood. How could he expect that she
would return to him? It was not reasonable. He ought to go down on his
knees with gratitude that she even condescended to write him.

Sitting one night till late,--so late that the fashionable young wives
with their husbands had retired from the strips of stair carpeting,--and
raging at the loneliness which ate at his heart like a cancer, he heard,
softly creeping through the windows of the house adjoining his own, the
sound of comfortable melody.

It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking
of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of
aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find
attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these
things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the
spirit--that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listened
as one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the hot road,
hears, far in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a spring.

Then came harmonies more intricate: fair fabrics of woven sound, in
the midst of which gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of sound,
multi-tinted, gallant with story and achievement, and beautiful things.
Bo