ourage and the belief in happiness. Knowing but little of the April
brevity of his uncle's mating impulse, he had mentally embroidered the
bare instinct with some of the idealism in which his own emotion was
clothed. His imagination pictured Cyrus and Belinda starting as
light-hearted adventurers to sail the chartless seas of romance. What
remained of their gallant ship to-day except a stark and battered hulk
wrecked on the pitiless rocks of the actuality? A month ago that
marriage had seemed merely ridiculous to him. Standing now beside the
little window, where the wan face of evening, languid and fainting
sweet, looked in from the purple twilight, he was visited by one of
those rare flashes of insight which come to men of artistic sensibility
after long periods of spiritual warfare. Pity stabbed him as sharply as
ridicule had done a moment before, and with the first sense of human
kinship he had ever felt to Cyrus, he understood suddenly the tragedy
that underlies all comic things. Could there be a deeper pathos, after
all, than simply being funny? This absurd old man, with his lean,
crooked figure, his mottled skin, and his piercing bloodshot eyes, like
the eyes of an overgorged bird of prey, appeared now as an object that
moved one to tears, not to laughter. And yet because of this very
quality which made him pitiable--this vulture-like instinct to seize and
devour the smaller--he stood to-day the most conspicuously envied figure
in Dinwiddie.

"I'm not the kind of man to marry," he repeated, but his tone had
changed.

"Well, perhaps you're wise," said Cyrus, "but if you should ever want
to----" The confidence which had gone out of Oliver had passed into him.
With his strange power of reading human nature--masculine human nature,
for the silliest woman could fool him hopelessly--he saw that his nephew
was already beginning to struggle against the temptation to yield. And
he was wise enough to know that this temptation would become stronger as
soon as Oliver felt that the outside pressure was removed. The young
man's passion was putting forward a subtler argument than Cyrus could
offer.

When his visitor had gone, Oliver turned back to the window, and resting
his arms on the sill, leaned out into the velvet softness of the
twilight. His wide vision had deserted him. It was as if his gaze had
narrowed down to a few roofs and the single street without a
turning--but beyond them the thought of Virginia lay always lik