rough days of the old West, feel the youth who had worked
his way across the ocean on a cattle-ship and gone to study in Paris
without a dollar in his pocket. The man who sat in his offices in Boston
was only a powerful machine. Under the activities of that machine the
person who, in such moments as this, he felt to be himself, was fading
and dying. He remembered how, when he was a little boy and his father
called him in the morning, he used to leap from his bed into the full
consciousness of himself. That consciousness was Life itself. Whatever
took its place, action, reflection, the power of concentrated thought,
were only functions of a mechanism useful to society; things that could
be bought in the market. There was only one thing that had an absolute
value for each individual, and it was just that original impulse, that
internal heat, that feeling of one's self in one's own breast.

When Alexander walked back to his hotel, the red and green lights were
blinking along the docks on the farther shore, and the soft white stars
were shining in the wide sky above the river.

The next night, and the next, Alexander repeated this same foolish
performance. It was always Miss Burgoyne whom he started out to find,
and he got no farther than the Temple gardens and the Embankment. It
was a pleasant kind of loneliness. To a man who was so little given
to reflection, whose dreams always took the form of definite ideas,
reaching into the future, there was a seductive excitement in renewing
old experiences in imagination. He started out upon these walks half
guiltily, with a curious longing and expectancy which were wholly
gratified by solitude. Solitude, but not solitariness; for he walked
shoulder to shoulder with a shadowy companion--not little Hilda
Burgoyne, by any means, but some one vastly dearer to him than she had
ever been--his own young self, the youth who had waited for him upon the
steps of the British Museum that night, and who, though he had tried to
pass so quietly, had known him and come down and linked an arm in his.

It was not until long afterward that Alexander learned that for him this
youth was the most dangerous of companions.

One Sunday evening, at Lady Walford's, Alexander did at last meet Hilda
Burgoyne. Mainhall had told him that she would probably be there. He
looked about for her rather nervously, and finally found her at the
farther end of the large drawing-room, the centre of a circle of men,
y