eous, tangled knot of destiny and let free the
boy to the old ways of innocence.

"He will curse me," he thought; "I shall die--never looking on his
face--never hearing his voice. But he will be freed--so. He will
suffer--for a day--a year. But he will be spared the truth. And he is so
young--he will be glad again before the summer comes."

For a moment his courage failed him.

He could face the thought of an eternity of pain, and not turn pale, nor
pause. But to die with the boy's curse on him--that was harder.

"It is selfishness to pause," he told himself. "He will loathe me
always; but what matter?--he will be saved; he will be innocent once
more; he will hear his 'beautiful things' again; he will never know the
truth; he will be at peace with himself, and forget before the summer
comes. He never has loved me--not much. What does it matter?--so that he
is saved. When he sees his mother in heaven some day, then she will say
to him--'It was done for your sake.' And I shall know that he sees then,
as God sees. That will be enough."

* * *

The boy looked out through the iron bars of his open lattice into the
cold, still night, full of the smell of fallen leaves and fir cones. The
tears fell down his cheeks; his heart was oppressed with a vague
yearning, such as made Mozart weep, when he heard his own Lacrimosa
chanted.

It is not fear of death, it is not desire of life.

It is that unutterable want, that nameless longing, which stirs in the
soul that is a little purer than its fellow, and which, burdened with
that prophetic pain which men call genius, blindly feels its way after
some great light, that knows must be shining somewhere upon other
worlds, though all the earth is dark.

When Mozart wept, it was for the world he could never reach--not for the
world he left.

* * *

He had been brought up upon this wooded spur, looking down on the Signa
country; all his loves and hatreds, joys and pains, had been known here;
from the time he had plucked the maple leaves in autumn for the cattle
with little brown five-year-old hands he had laboured here, never seeing
the sun set elsewhere except on that one night at the sea. He was close
rooted to the earth as the stonepines were and the oaks. It had always
seemed to him that a man should die where he took life first, amongst
his kindred and under the sods that his feet had run over in babyhood.
He had never thought much abou