n too ill to answer his
letter, and have lost touch with him."

Everett drew a letter from his pocket. "This came about a month ago.
It's chiefly about his new opera, which is to be brought out in London
next winter. Read it at your leisure."

"I think I shall keep it as a hostage, so that I may be sure you will
come again. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever you like; but if
there is anything new in the world, in mercy let me hear it. For nine
months I have heard nothing but 'The Baggage Coach Ahead' and 'She Is My
Baby's Mother.'"

He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his
remarkable physical likeness to his brother and trying to discover in
just what it consisted. She told herself that it was very much as though
a sculptor's finished work had been rudely copied in wood. He was of
a larger build than Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy,
while those of his brother were slender and rather girlish. His face was
of the same oval mold, but it was gray and darkened about the mouth by
continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April color,
but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's were always
points of highlight, and always meaning another thing than the thing
they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why this earnest man should
so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face that was as gay as his
was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though
his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so
mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words. A
contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and of her
affections, had once said to him that the shepherd boys who sang in the
Vale of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde; and the
comparison had been appropriated by a hundred shyer women who preferred
to quote.

As Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that
night, he was a victim to random recollections. His infatuation for
Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his
boyish love affairs, and had long disturbed his bachelor dreams. He was
painfully timid in everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt
had withdrawn him from the society of women. The fact that it was all so
done and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her
life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and lo