a careless feast, and began his story.

Well, he had had a splendid day, too. After he had left her he had gone
to the dealer's on the avenue with the unsold papers. Then he had
crossed over to the cathedral, and for a while had watched the men at
work up in the air. He had walked around to the choir school, but no one
was there that morning, not a sound came from the inside. Then he had
started down across the park. As he sat down to count his money, a man
who had climbed up the hillside stopped and asked him a great many
questions: who taught him music and whether any one had ever heard him
sing. This stranger also liked music and he also went to the cathedral,
so he claimed. From that point the story wound its way onward across the
busy hours till nightfall.

It was a child's story, not an older person's. Therefore it did not draw
the line between pleasant and unpleasant, fair and unfair, right and
wrong, which make up for each of us the history of our checkered human
day. It separated life as a swimmer separates the sea: there is one
water which he parts by his passage. So the child, who is still wholly a
child, divides the world.

But as she pondered, she discriminated. Out of the long, rambling
narrative she laid hold of one overwhelming incident, forgetting the
rest: a passing stranger, hearing a few notes of his voice, had stopped
to question him about it. To her this was the first outside evidence
that her faith in his musical gift was not groundless.

When he had ended his story she regarded him across the table with
something new in her eyes--something of awe. She had never hinted to him
what she believed he would some day be. She might be wrong, and thus
might start him on the wrong course; or, being right, she might never
have the chance to start him on the right one. In either case she might
be bringing to him disappointment, perhaps the failure of his whole
life.

Now she still hid the emotion his story caused. But the stranger of the
park had kindled within her that night what she herself had long tended
unlit--the alabaster flame of worship which the mother burns before the
altar of a great son.

An hour later they were in another small attic-like space next to the
supper-room. Here was always the best of their evening. No matter how
poor the spot, if there reach it some solitary ray of the great light of
the world, let it be called your drawing-room. Where civilization sends
its beams through a