amongst the keen conflict of intellect at the universities, not in the
toils of the great vague disquiet which was throbbing amongst all
cultured and artistic society, but in the eternal silence of Mont Blanc
and her snow-capped Alps, and the whisperings of the night winds which
blew across the valleys. At Heidelberg he had been a philosopher, in
Italy he had been a scholar, and in Switzerland he became a poet. When
once again he returned to the more feverish life of cities he was a
changed man. He looked out upon life now with different eyes and
enlarged vision. Passion had given place to a certain studied calm, a
sort of inward contemplativeness which is ever inseparable from the true
artist. Life became for him almost too impersonal, too little human.
Soon it threatened to become one long abstraction, accompanied
necessarily with a weakened hold on all sensuous things, and a
corresponding decline in taste and appreciation. One thing had saved him
from relapsing into the nervous dreamer, and the weaver of bright but
aimless fancies. He had loved, and he had become a man again, linked to
the world and the things of the world by the pulsations of his passion
and his strong deep love. Was it well for him or ill, he wondered. Well,
it might have been save for the deadly peril in which he lived, and
which seemed closing fast around him. Well, it surely would have
been....

Lower and lower the sun had sunk, till now its rim touched the horizon.
The evening breeze stealing down from the hills had gathered strength
until now it was almost cold. The distant sound of footsteps, and the
gay laughing voices of the promenaders from the awakening town broke the
deep stillness which had hung over the garden and recalled Bernard
Maddison from thoughtland. He rose to his feet, a little stiff, and
walked slowly along the path towards the villa. At that same moment, Mr.
Benjamin Levy, tired and angry with his long waiting, stole into the
garden by the postern-gate.

CHAPTER XXXI

BENJAMIN LEVY WRITES HOME

"_June 10th_.

"MY DEAR DAD:--

"I wired you yesterday afternoon, immediately on our arrival at
this outlandish little place, to write to me at the hotel Leon
d'Or, for it seems that we have reached our destination--by we, of
course, I mean Mr. Maddison and myself, though he has not the least
idea of my presence here. Well, this is a queer old crib, I can
tell you, and the soone