as close to melancholy.

Suddenly he bent his head. From the earth arose the golden music of a
million tiny bells. They had hung rusty and warped since the hurricane,
but to-night they rang again, and as sweetly as on the night, seventeen
years ago, when their music filled the Universe, and two souls, whose
destiny it was to bring a greater into the world, were flooded with a
diviner music than that fairy melody. Alexander knew nothing of that
meeting of his parents, when they were but a few years older than he was
to-night, but the inherited echo of those hours when his own soul
awaited its sentence may have stirred in his brain, for he stood there
and dreamed of his mother and father as they had looked and thought when
they had met and loved; and this he had never done before. The tireless
little ringers filled his brain with their Lilliputian clamour, and his
imagination gave him his parents in the splendour of their young beauty
and passion. For the first time he forgave his father, and he had a deep
moment of insight: one of the mysteries of life was bare before him. He
was to have many of these cosmic moments, for although his practical
brain relied always on hard work, never on inspiration, his divining
faculty performed some marvellous feats, and saved him from much
plodding; but he never had a moment of insight which left a profounder
impression than this. He understood in a flash the weakness of the
world, and his own. At first he was appalled, then he pitied, then he
vibrated to the thrill of that exultation which had possessed his mother
the night on the mountain when she made up her mind to outstay her
guests. And then the future seemed to beckon more imperiously to the boy
for whose sake she had remained, the radiant image of his parents melted
in its crucible, and the world was flooded with a light which revealed
more than the smoke of battlefields and the laurels of fulfilled
ambition.

XIII

On the following day, as Alexander stood on the wharf with his tearful
relatives and friends, Hugh Knox detached him from Mrs. Mitchell and led
him aside.

"Alec," he said, "I've two pieces of parting advice for you, and I want
you to put them into the pocket of your memory that's easiest to find.
Get a tight rein on that temper of yours. It's improved in the last
year, but there's room yet. That's the first piece. This is the second:
keep your own counsel about the irregularity of your birth, unless
someone