that he
would conquer the world! Probably there was no such moment. The great
Alexander was restless, and at no initial instant did he conceive his
scheme of conquest. Nor was it one event that set him in motion. We
confound events with causes. It happened on such a day. Yes, but it
might have happened on another. But if Philip had not been sent on that
errand to Mavick probably Evelyn would never have met him. What
nonsense this is, and what an unheroic character it makes Philip! Is it
supposable that, with such a romance as he had developed about the girl,
he would not some time have come near her, even if she had been locked
up with all the bars and bolts of a safety deposit?

The incident of this momentary meeting was, however, of great
consequence. There is no such feeder of love as the imagination. And
fortunate it was for Philip that his romance was left to grow in the
wonder-working process of his own mind. At first there had been merely
a curiosity in regard to a person whose history and education had been
peculiar. Then the sight of her had raised a strange tumult in his
breast, and his fancy began to play about her image, seen only at a
distance and not many times, until his imagination built up a being of
surpassing loveliness, and endowed with all the attractions that the
poets in all ages have given to the sex that inspires them. But this
sort of creation in the mind becomes vague, and related to literature
only, unless it is sustained by some reality. Even Petrarch must
occasionally see Laura at the church door, and dwell upon the veiled
dreamer that passed and perhaps paused a moment to regard him with sad
eyes. Philip, no doubt, nursed a genuine passion, which grew into an
exquisite ideal in the brooding of a poetic mind, but it might in
time have evaporated into thin air, remaining only as an emotional and
educational experience. But this moment in Mr. Mavick's library had
given a solid body to his imaginations, and a more definite turn to his
thought of her.

If, in some ordinary social chance, Philip had encountered the heiress,
without this previous wonderworking of his imagination in regard to
her, the probability is that he would have seen nothing especially to
distinguish her from the other girls of her age and newness in social
experience. Certainly the thought that she was the possessor of
uncounted millions would have been, on his side, an insuperable barrier
to any advance. But the imaginat