of seeming to Rudolph
Musgrave a connected and really important transaction on Rudolph
Musgrave's part. Yet Lichfield, none the better for Rudolph Musgrave's
having lived, was none the worse, thank heaven! And there were younger
men in Lichfield--men who did not mean to fail as Rudolph Musgrave and
his fellows all had failed.... Eh, yes, what was the toast that Rudolph
Musgrave drank, so long ago, to the new Lichfield which these younger
men were making?

"To this new South, that has not any longer need of me or of my kind.

"To this new South! She does not gaze unwillingly, nor too complacently,
upon old years, and dares concede that but with loss of manliness may
any man encroach upon the heritage of a dog or of a trotting-horse, and
consider the exploits of an ancestor to guarantee an innate and personal
excellence.

"For to her all former glory is less a jewel than a touchstone, and with
her portion of it daily she appraises her own doing, and without vain
speech. And her high past she values now, in chief, as fit foundation of
that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with augmenting
strokes."

Yes, that was it. And it was true. Yet Rudolph Musgrave's life on earth
was ending now--the only life that he would ever have on earth--and it
had never risen to the plane of seeming even to Rudolph Musgrave a
really important transaction on Rudolph Musgrave's part....

Then Patricia spoke. Low and very low she called to Olaf, and the dim,
wistful eyes of Rudolph Musgrave lifted, and gazed full upon her
standing there, and were no longer wistful. And the man made as though
to rise, and could not, and his face was very glad.

For in the dying man had awakened the pulses of an old, strange,
half-forgotten magic, and all his old delight in the girl who had shared
in and had provoked this ancient wonder-working, together with a quite
new consciousness of the inseparability of Patricia's foibles from his
existence; so that he was incuriously aware of his imbecility in not
having known always that Patricia must come back some day, not as a
glorious, unfamiliar angel, but unaltered.

"I am glad you haven't changed.... Why, but of course! Nothing would
have counted if you had changed--not even for the better, Patricia. For
you and what you meant to me were real. That only was real--that we, not
being demigods, but being just what we were, once climbed together very
high, where we could glimpse the stars--and nothing e