hen the flowering of an
interval of hard work and its reward of almost supernatural joy.

"He used to go around in a rainbow," said Hugh, "a sort of holy soap
bubble. I hardly dared to speak to him for fear of breaking it. It came
with a new inspiration, and while it lasted nothing on earth was so
important. Then when it was finished he never wanted to see the thing
again."

"Go on," said his listener. Her grey eyes plumbed his with a child's
directness. He was conscious of his will playing on her. He was keeping
his part of the contract, but he was also breaking the way for hers. He
must not let them go for a moment, those grey eyes like a girl's that
grew absent-minded so easily. Only a little more and his mood would
curve around both them, a glamorous mist of feeling.

"You go on," he murmured. "Can't you see how much I want you to? Can't
you feel how much I'm the right person to know?"

"I could never tell any one. You want--"

"Anything, everything. You must have known him better than anybody in
he world did."

"I think so," she said, slowly "And I saw him alone only twice in my
life."

For some time he had sat with his long fingers over his mouth, afraid of
checking her by an untimely word.

"Of course I was in his classes. You know he had an extraordinary
success; he struck twelve at once, as they say there. The French really
discovered him as a poet, just as Mallarme discovered Poe; some of them
used that parallel. And the girls--he was a matinee idol and a
cult--even the French girls. We went into that classroom thrilling as we
never went to any ball. I worked that winter for him harder than I had
ever worked in my life, and about Easter he began to single me out for
the most merciless fault-finding. That was his way of showing that he
considered you worth while. He had a habit of standing over you in
class, holding your paper like a knout. And once or twice--I called
myself a conceited little idiot--but once or twice--"

Hugh nodded. His pulses were singing like morning stars at the spectacle
of a new world.

"He used to say of a certain excited, happy feeling, a sort of fey
feeling, that you seemed to have swallowed a heavenly pigeon. And--well,
he looked like that. But I knocked my vanity on the head and told it,
'Down to the other dogs.' I was used to young men; I knew how little
such manifestations could mean. But after that I used to set little
lines in the things I wrote for him, very delica