d.
"--Build that house," she repeated, "and line it with books--the kind of
books that were written and read before the machine-made sort supplanted
them. One picture to a room--do you remember, Jim?--or two if you find
it better; the kind men painted before Rembrandt died.... Do you
remember your plan?--the plans you drew for me to look at in our front
parlour--when New York houses had parlours? You were twenty and I
fourteen.... Garry, yonder, was not.... And the rugs, you
recollect?--one or two in a room, Shiraz, Ispahan--nothing as obvious as
Sehna and Saraband--nothing but Moresque and pure Persian--and one
agedly perfect gem of Asia Minor, and one Tekke, so old and flawless
that only the pigeon-blood fire remained under the violet bloom.... Do
you remember?"

Wayward's shoulders straightened with a jerk. For twenty years he had
not remembered these things; and she had not only remembered but was now
reciting the strange, quaint, resurrected words in their forgotten
sequence; the words he had uttered as he--or what he had once been--sat
in the old-time parlour in the mellow half light of faded brocades and
rosewood, repeating to a child the programme of his future. Lofty aim
and high ideal, the cultivated endeavour of good citizenship, loyalty to
aspiration, courage, self-respect, and the noble living of life; they
had also spoken of these things together--there in the golden gloom of
the old-time parlour when she was fourteen and he master of his fate and
twenty.

But there came into his life a brilliant woman who stayed a year and
left his name a mockery: Malcourt's only sister, now Lady Tressilvain,
doubtfully conspicuous with her loutish British husband, among those
continentals where titles serve rather to obscure than enlighten
inquiry.

The wretched affair dragged its full offensive length through the
international press; leaving him with his divorce signed and a future
endurable only when his senses had been sufficiently drugged. In sober
intervals he now had neuritis and a limp to distract his mind; also his
former brother-in-law with professions of esteem and respect and a
tendency to borrow. And drunk or sober he had the _Ariani_. But the
house that Youth had built in the tinted obscurity of an old New York
parlour--no, he didn't have that; and even memory of it were wellnigh
gone had not Constance Palliser spoken from the shadows of the past.

He lifted his glass unsteadily and replaced it. Then sl