arley Gaylord's ponies, or
fishing in the mountains. In the afternoon he was usually at his post of
duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions about
the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the
compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played
the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a
stop-gap all his life. He remembered going through a looking-glass
labyrinth when he was a boy, and trying gallery after gallery, only at
every turn to bump his nose against his own face--which, indeed, was not
his own, but his brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west, by
land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's
business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining
current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first time that his duty
had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his
brother's imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no
attempt to analyse the situation or to state it in exact terms; but he
accepted it as a commission from his brother to help this woman to die.
Day by day he felt her need for him grow more acute and positive; and day
by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her, his own
individuality played a smaller part. His power to minister to her comfort
lay solely in his link with his brother's life. He knew that she sat by
him always watching for some trick of gesture, some familiar play of
expression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should seem
wholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this, and that in the
exhaustion which followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept
deep and sweet, and dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old
Florentine garden, and not of bitterness and death.

A few days after his first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled
his brother to write her. He merely said that she was mortally ill;
he could depend on Adriance to say the right thing--that was a part of
his gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but the
opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. He caught the lyric essence of the
moment, the poetic suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually
did the right thing,--except, when he did very cruel things--bent upon
making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted
that his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon th