lared, holding his hand straight out in front of him, pointing
downward toward the half-hidden panorama.

The boy shook his head.

"For other people they would not count," he said. "They are for myself
only. What I see would be invisible to you."

"A matter of eyesight?" Rochester asked, with raised eyebrows.

"Of imagination," the boy answered. "There is no necessity for you to
look outside your own immediate surroundings to see beautiful things,
unless you choose deliberately to make your life an ugly thing. With
us it is different--with us who work for a living, who dwell in the
cities, and who have no power to push back the wheels of life. If we
are presumptuous enough to wish to take into our lives anything of the
beautiful, anything to help us fight our daily battle against the
commonplace, we have to create it for ourselves. That is why I am here
just now, and why I was regretting, when I heard your footstep, that
one finds it so hard to be alone."

"So I am to be ordered off?" Rochester remarked, smiling.

The boy did not answer. The man did not move. The minutes went by, and
the silence remained unbroken. Below, the twilight seemed to be
passing into night with unusual rapidity. It was a shapeless world
now, a world of black and gray. More lights flashed out every few
seconds.

It was the boy who broke the silence at last. He seemed, in some
awkward way, to be trying to atone for his former unsociability.

"This is my last night at the Convalescent Home," he said, a little
abruptly. "I am cured. To-morrow I am going back to my work in
Mechester. For many days I shall see nothing except actual things. I
shall know nothing of life except its dreary and material side. That
is why I came here with the twilight. That is why I am going to sit
here till the night comes--perhaps, even, I shall wait until the dawn.
I want one last long rest. I want to carry away with me some absolute
impression of life as I would have it. Down there," he added, moving
his head slowly, "down there I can see the things I want--the things
which, if I could, I would take into my life. I am going to look at
them, and think of them, and long for them, until they seem real. I am
going to create a concrete memory, and take it away with me."

Rochester looked more than a little puzzled. The boy's speech seemed
in no way in keeping with his attire, and the fact of his presence in
a charitable home.

"Might one inquire once more," he a