ought her note-book, and sat beside him. Being ignorant of
shorthand she had invented a little system of her own, and she was glad
when she could make him laugh over her funny pot-hooks and her straggling
sketches.

Thus in the darkness Geoffrey struggled and strove. "Speaking of
candlesticks," he wrote to Anne, "it was as if a thousand candles lighted
my world when I read your letter!"

CHAPTER XVI

_In Which Pan Pipes to the Stars._

THAT Richard in New York should miss his mother was inevitable. But he
was not homesick. He was too busy for that. Austin's vogue was
tremendous.

"Every successful man ought to be two men," he told Richard, as they
talked together one Sunday night at Austin's place in Westchester,
"'another and himself,' as Browning puts it. Then there would be one to
labor and the other to enjoy. I want to retire, and I can't. There's a
selfish instinct in all of us to grip and hold. That is why I am pinning
my faith to you. You can slip in as I slip out. I have visions of riding
to hounds and sailing the seas some day, to say nothing of putting up a
good game of golf. But perhaps that's a dream. A man can't get away from
his work, not when he loves it."

"That's why you're such a success, sir," Richard told him, honestly; "you
go to every operation as if it were a banquet."

Austin laughed. "I'm not such a ghoul. But there's always the wonder of
it with me. I sometimes wish I had been a churchgoing man, Brooks. There
isn't much more for me to learn about bodies, but there's much about
souls. I have a feeling that some day in some physical experiment I shall
find tangible evidence of the spiritual. That's why I say my prayers to
Something every night, and I rather think It's God."

"I know it's God," said Richard, simply, "on such a night as this."

They were silent in the face of the evening's beauty. The great trees on
the old estate were black against a silver sky. White statues shone like
pale ghosts among them. Back of Richard and his host, in a semicircle of
dark cedars, a marble Pan piped to the stars.

"And in the cities babies are sleeping on fire escapes," Austin
meditated. "If I had had a son I should have sent him to the slums to
find his work. But the Fates have given me only Marie-Louise."

And now his laugh was forced. "Brooks, the Gods have checkmated me.
Marie-Louise is the son of her father. I had planned that she should be
the daughter of her mother. I sowed some