bove the adolescent din of the group and to the father seemed to be the
dominant note in the hilarious cadenza of young life. It struck him that
they were like fireflies, glowing and darting and disappearing and
weaving about.

And fireflies indeed they were. For in them the fires of life were just
beginning to sparkle. Slowly the great bat of a car moved up past them,
then darted around the block like the blind creature that it was, and
whirling its awkward circle came swooping up again to the glowing,
animated stars that held him in a deadly fascination. For those
twinkling, human stars playing like fireflies in exquisite joy at the
first faint kindling in their hearts of the fires that flame forever in
the torch of life, might well have held in their spell a stronger man
than Thomas Van Dorn. For the first evanescent fires of youth are the
most sacred fires in the world. And well might the great, black bat of a
car circle again and again and even again around and come always back to
the beautiful light.

But Thomas Van Dorn came back not happily but in sad unrest. It was as
though the black bat carried captive on its back a weary pilgrim from
the Primrose Hunt, jaded and spent and dour, who saw in the sacred fires
what he had cast away, what he had deemed worthless and of a sudden had
seen in its true beauty and in its real value. Once again as the
fireflies played their ceaseless game with the ever flickering glow of
youth shining through eyes and cheeks from their hearts, the great bat
carrying its captive swooped around them--and then out into the darkness
of his own charred world.

But the fireflies in the gay spring twilight kept darting and
criss-crossing and frolicking up the walk. One by one, each swiftly or
lazily disappeared from the maze, and at last only two, Kenyon and Lila,
went weaving up the lawn toward the steps of the Nesbit house.

It had been one of those warm days when spring is just coming into the
world. All day the boy had been roaming the wide prairies. The voices of
the wind in the brown grass and in the bare trees by the creek had found
their way into his soul. A curious soul it was--the soul of a poet, the
soul of one who felt infinitely more than he knew--the soul of a man in
the body of a callow youth.

As he and Lila walked up the hill, all the dreams that had swept across
him out in the fields came to him. They sat on the south steps of the
Nesbit house watching the spring that wa