THE MAYOR’S VISIT

The Mayor had been very punctual in keeping his engagement with Miss Lorimer. He was standing in the wide parlor of the Lorimer mansion into which he had been ushered by a servant apparently already apprized of his expected visit, so felicitously suave was that person’s reception of him, and so unhesitatingly was he conducted over the hallway to the great parlors.

The room or succession of rooms, in which he found himself was a superb example of architecture and decoration. The effect of a kind of compromise between colonial spaciousness and simplicity in the proportions of the room, and a Louis Quinze elaboration in its furniture, was not as disquieting as might have been anticipated, seeing too that the villa in many aspects was an Italian creation. The ceilings were high, the windows broad, and almost destitute of the framed arrangement of heavy mouldings; the cornice of the room was scarcely emphasized, the windows descended to the floor.

The decorative features were a treatment in gold and pink with the chairs and sofas upholstered in Du Barry satin, garlands of painted roses delicately imprinted the flat ceiling, high mirrors framed in gilt surmounted marble mantels overhanging generous hearths, and the august dignity reached an intellectual note and emphasis in the few large and many smaller paintings which were, with one or two exceptions, the works of American artists, and were, for the most part, landscapes. The three exceptions were religious subjects, being carefully executed copies of The Assumption of Murillo, The Flight by Correggio, and a Holy Family by Domenichino.

Great rugs were spread over the marqueterie floor, Du Barry pink satin curtains, overspreading lace portieres, hung at the windows, a grand piano was accommodated in a swelling niche on one side, and the chandeliers intricately composed, and thrown into a sort of bizarre relief by white enamel threads upon them, supported a galaxy of opalescent globes lit with electric lamps.

It was evening and in summer. The Mayor entered the brilliant and glowing room, walked admiringly towards an Inness which hung almost opposite the entrance of the parlors, and then sat down in a convenient chair, his eyes eagerly inspecting the delicate opulence about him. Near him was a remarkable table—a creation in ivory and ebony—and he noticed a few book-cases holding books bound in white, a few marble sculptures were revealed, and a snowy owl, upon an ivory bracket loomed upon him as at least, if not tasteless, an indiscreet note in the beautiful rooms.

A moment later and his eyes encountered, approaching him from the distant end of the room two female figures, one of whom he quickly recognized, though now Miss Lorimer came to him in a sort of aureole of summer emanations—her dark hair unadorned—and wearing a faintly blue ashen gown, the sleeves caught thrice about her arms with black velvet loops. A brooch of blood red Mexican opal set with emeralds was at her neck, catching the lapels of a frilled white collar which rose upon her neck, while around her waist a quaint armorial belt, fastened with an old and lustrous Chinese buckle, holding a purple fluorite and a green jadeite, added a note of exotic culture. She was radiant, and as the young man rose to his feet his face brightened into an appreciation which spoke almost too plainly his own admiration. Julieta was with her daughter, and her matronly outline and the dark color of her garb was a foil to the latter’s interesting loveliness.

“Your Honor, my Mother,” was the salutation of Miss Lorimer, who seemed eager to begin the serious work before them. The gentleman bowed and expressed his pleasure, and then as Mrs. Lorimer spoke of her daughter’s mission in connection with the new trial of the prisoners seized at the time of the destruction of the Settlement House, Helen Lorimer herself pushed a table forward, drew three chairs up to it and rang a bell.

Answering the summons a servant appeared with a number of portfolios, and almost at the same moment the parlor doors swung apart, and Mr. Theodore Lorimer accompanied by a broad featured gentleman entered. Introductions followed, and the Mayor learned that Mr. Lorimer’s companion was the clever and industrious lawyer who had discovered a mass of new evidence, and was willing to stake his reputation upon his complete ability to prove that five of the men under sentence, had nothing to do with the disastrous explosion and fire, leaving the guilt weighing heavily on the sixth, Polinck, Longtinsky’s confidant, and with a preponderant disposition of the facts pointing to the central and animating spirit of mischief as residing in Longtinsky himself.

Mr. Moser was a short man with a relentless intimation of power in his expression. Somehow it rested in his broad shoulders, clean shaven and pugnacious jaw, his small deep set and musing eyes, the crisply moving thin fingers and particularly in his thin lips that closed against each other in a vise-like way that suggested an interior mental grasp as tight as this physical analogue.

When the portfolios had been opened and the entire party was seated at the table, Mr. Moser rose up, and developed his position. It was admirably done. It was clear; it seemed unmistakably certain that Mr. Moser could prove the points which came out with bristling alacrity. He made them in a matter-of-fact way, quite devoid of parade, and in a conversational undertone, with a relieving gesture, and now and then, especially aiming them at the Mayor, a convincing puckering of his tense eyebrows:

“Longtinsky has a serpent’s tongue and the brain of a demon. The men about him are his dupes. He plays them as you might play cards. He holds them in his hand and no scruples interfere with his using them for his own profit and their ruin. And yet he is a clumsy contriver. The simple confound the wise. A child steps in, and his fabric of deceit tumbles into pieces. It is a play-loving child, with a dash of curiosity, just a trace of the sleuth strangely developing—a fine prophetic instance of tendency Sir. This child drawn by some peculiarity in Longtinsky’s looks follows him; shows an old age interest in the man. And why? Because Longtinsky gave him a picture book. This inflamed the child’s imagination. It exerted some hypnotic influence. By a queer coincidence the book contained an illustrated story of a Russian nihilist, and the boy identified him with Longtinsky. He follows him, shadows him, if you will, a very mania of pictorial identification seized him. In Longtinsky he saw the hero of his story. In every incident he caught a reflexion of the episodes of his tale. Longtinsky either mistook his devotion or it was unobserved, or the tender years of this boy deceived him. The boy hung round his printing office; he was amused by Longtinsky who gave him blocks and toy type to play with. Longtinsky may have dreamed that the child would grow up into a keen edged accomplice in his games. At any rate he took little notice of the boy’s incessant observation, and he never suspected his sensitive memory.

“Every impression remained there, and they remained marvellously distinct. There are no shadows among them. The child’s mind is a photographic plate. The child was also attracted by Miss Lorimer. He was one of the visitors at the Settlement House, and made good use of its advantages. But it was a different sort of attraction. He had absorbed Longtinsky’s hatred for this excellent benefactor and mixing up the impressions of his hero in the Russian story he made out for himself that Longtinsky was the victim of persecution directed by Miss Lorimer.

“This boy was at the very centre of the operations that turned the Settlement House into ashes. He saw the bombs taken from Longtinsky’s office of The Beehive at night to the Settlement House. It was a night when the House was watched, the Janitor was away: there was collusion somewhere. Four men brought those implements of destruction there. TWO OF THEM WERE LONGTINSKY AND POLINCK. This boy although obsessed by an incredible devotion to Longtinsky never revealed his feeling but like some parasitic thread of life clung to him, slipped on behind him unknown, stood in the shadow of the doorways, slunk from retreat to retreat along the streets. He too was vitally active as if driven by a flame of madness. He saw everything and, what was more astonishing, he understood. He lived through it all, the life of his hero in the Russian tale. He slunk among the conspirators as their unseen or unnoticed Nemesis. His parched and contracted nature became monomaniacal with a detective precocity. His mind like wax took impressions that were retained as if in steel.

“This strange object I met—after Miss Lorimer had engaged me to look into this case—I saw him at the ruins of the Settlement House, and something—as he stood on the brink of the smoking excavation—piqued my curiosity—not averse Sir, to finding evidence in the smallest scraps—and I spoke to him. I found out that he had been in the House a few minutes before the explosion, that he knew Longtinsky. His warped precocity of observation had not changed a natural childlike simplicity for he was easily led on into the startling admission that showed that Longtinsky and Polinck had placed the bombs in the House themselves, had afterwards taken into the House the men who have been accused and convicted of the crime at the moment when the bombs were lit. This dodging boy had followed Longtinsky and Polinck in, when they placed the fuses. Afterwards Longtinsky escaped to his home, and left it to Polinck to inveigle and desert the victims of their mutual treachery. Polinck would have gotten away too except for the time lost in making the oil and rag fires that consumed the place. The boy has no parents but lived with some family who pitied his lonely condition and he wandered about the streets almost unobserved and uncared for. His peculiar temperament developed into a queer intensity of moroseness wherein the seeds of his unnatural attachment to Longtinsky grew and flourished.

“After the catastrophe this boy seemed stunned, and I met him at a psychological moment, when he needed a confessor. He craved the opportunity to tell all he knew and by some reversion as strange as his former hallucination, he now believes it necessary to do something for the men whom he saw taken by the police. Some of these men have protested their innocence of the exact crime, but the circumstances of their apparent participation were too strong against them. This boy your Honor will exculpate them, and I believe that he will keep the rigid immobile steadiness of his story under the fiercest cross-examination. He is of course uncorroborated by others, and it remains to be seen how his narrative will effect a jury. On him Sir, we pin with certainty our conviction that the men now under judgment of death will be freed.”

“Where is this boy?” said the Mayor.

Miss Lorimer rose and in a few moments returned with the singular being, whose abnormal and subtle watchfulness had put so complete a reversal upon the course of events with the suspects.

As the boy came up to the table the Mayor rose, and his example was followed by all present. The boy stood in the centre of a wondering group. He was a creature likely to attract attention among those accustomed to interest themselves in a face as the symbol and expression of the nature beneath it. Extremely thin, with a stunted effect produced by the drooping of one shoulder, and his cross-eyed vision, his arms would excite wonder at once. They were so long. His hands were flat and bony, and by some sort of interior nervousness they seemed to be constantly in motion, twitching or seizing his clothes as if worried by their fit or arrangement. His face would have attracted attention any where, but it would also have been the attention of sympathy and commiseration. It was at every point almost disfigured and misshapen. The eyes were not on a level and the ears were curiously small and shrivelled, his forehead, as in hydrocephalics, was swollen and protuberant, his nose was a sharp ridge and his cheeks were sunken. Only his mouth bore the traces of an infantile charm, and it was perfectly formed and opened over perfect teeth. This latter feature conjoined with the deep clustering and raven darkness—lustrous too as a raven’s wing—of his abundant hair, redeemed his physiognomy and imparted a singular elfin weirdness to it, at least it raised the baffling surmise that his face was made in two parts, a worser and a better half, and their discord reflected some temperamental confusion, some alternating balance of moral or mental tendency. His eyes seemed to dread the light, and he kept them cast down, which further imparted a dead and expressionless vacancy to the rather blighted and uninteresting face.

This blankness remained only when his eyes were averted. Raised and opened, they became partially corrected in their alignment, by the frequent flashes of excitement they betrayed, and then intelligence entering his expression, his vexed and ill treated features gained something in orderliness, or the more repugnant hid themselves, and were forgotten, under this exaltation. He was short for his years, and pale, with flushes of color coming at the moments of excitement.

He was a small boy with excellent proportions of body other than in the simian arms and the defect of the drooping shoulder. In him again Miss Lorimer had turned the tables upon her antagonist. Angelo Shimura was an idolator. He craved objects of worship; they remained with him in his waking moments as supernatural incentives to his devotion. The subtlety and strength of his attachment had been tested with Longtinsky, as a mere objective personality, upon which he must lavish his imaginative attributes. But in reality his heart had not been warmed, and in that heart lay the unappeasable fires of the most slavish self-sacrifice.

The shock of the terrific incident which he had watched in its growth into a tragic issue had perhaps shattered that first extreme and provisional adherence; and now, brought under the power of a lofty nature, and fed with the nutriment of sympathy, his little passionate soul became steeped in love for his benefactress. In that company, whenever he raised his eyes, they sought the face of Miss Lorimer, as a dumb wistful yearning animal follows with unquestioning faithfulness and service its master’s. Its pathos touched the young Mayor, and his own heart followed the boy’s to the same goal.

When Mr. Moser had finished his short story after adding a few other more emphatic affirmations of his complete confidence to bring about a reversal of the conviction of five of the six men—Polinck always should be excepted—the company again took their places around the table, with the boy sitting alongside of Miss Lorimer and catching in a queer studious way the drift of the dialogue though his attention was more shown by the movement of his head than by the glances of his eyes.

The Mayor had become thoroughly aroused and felt deeply his indebtedness to Miss Lorimer for her interference. It had probably saved him and the community from a serious weight of remorse and opprobrium. Already the stay of the execution had been ordered by the Mayor, and the further steps to secure a new order for a trial were agreed upon. The case could not be now considered before the fall, and in the meanwhile it was hoped that the Mayor’s action would not meet censure. The diagrams and drawings in the portfolios were inspected. Many of them showed the stages in the construction of the old Settlement House, one was a photograph of the fire, another was of the prisoners and a third, of the most significant interest in their present hunt, was a chance photograph of Pitt Street, made by some wandering tourist engaged in a dilettante search for reminders of “the slums,” in which appeared two figures recognizable as Longtinsky and Polinck standing upon the opposite side of the street, and looking upward to the walls of the Settlement House, while far from them crouching in a doorway was the odd figure of the haunting Angelo Shimura.

The Mayor was surprised to see among these sketches, a series of perfected drawings for a new Settlement House, larger and more ornate than its predecessor and designed to comprise a Museum. On this point Miss Lorimer became eloquent. Her animation was intense and the charmed young man listened to her with delight. The nobility of her design heightened the fires burning brightly in his own heart, of sympathy with the “submerged,” and those to whom the chances of recreation and distraction are denied, the strangely forgotten units of life, who somehow must be masoned into the structure we call “The Nation,” and from whom, in the lottery of Fortune’s choice, great destinies may arise, or more practically, immense acquisitions of sane sentiment be won.

“The large museums” said Miss Lorimer, “are a long way off from the people I intend to help in this way. A museum, like a library, should be constantly used. Repetition tells, and memory makes a permanent record when it is deeply graven by iteration. Then it seems to me no museum, as I find them, does the work that can be done for these people in the most helpful way. Everything is remote and difficult in its presentation, or else simply pictorial. And my museum will be composite, and it will be national. I mean that there will be history and art and science in it, but all these will be concerned with America and its interests and objects.”

“I don’t imagine,” said the Mayor laughing, “that you intend to nationalize astronomy, for instance. We can hardly pretend to any monopoly of the stars.”

“You must not ridicule my project, Sir. Let me show you what I mean, in a way at least. Come and see my own museum. I have one in this house.”

“Indeed may I see it?” said the Mayor eagerly, “I may not know what you mean to do, but I can understand what you have done.”

“Yes, that would please me,” Miss Lorimer answered, as she rose and explained to the company her intention of giving the Mayor an object lesson in her “improvised museum at the top of the house.” She invited the others to accompany them, but Mr. Moser and Mr. Theodore Lorimer had a discussion under way, which they could not afford to interrupt, and Julieta excused herself. Thus the Mayor and Miss Lorimer went together through rooms and corridors, up staircases where niches rose imposingly on either side, adorned with sculptures, and at last entered the high attic, into a broad and long room set around with cases, occupied with tables, and somewhat divided into alcoves, while the windows were breaches in the walls, opening out upon the topmost balcony, which overlooked the trees, and now at night commanded a far-spread network of twinkling lights.

The place was singularly pleasant, and the feeling of physical elevation, as now and then the eye caught a moving barge of lights upon the Hudson or the halloo of shouts rose from the velvety darkness beneath, seemed grateful. The Mayor noticed that the objects promiscuously heaped around and in almost unrestrained confusion were for the most part pictures, prints, etchings, woodcuts, framed and loose, with pottery, porcelains, statuettes, and furniture. There were few of the usual accessories of the Natural History museum; a few shells in a case, a specimen, of large size, of quartz or feldspar or calcite, some gorgeous bird, a stuffed small animal, and a rather amusing collection of fossils. The Mayor had some scientific proclivities and a well developed appreciation of the objects of nature.

Miss Lorimer observed his surprise. “No,” she said, a slight blush mounting in her cheeks “I have not been very anxious for the regulation display of a scientific museum, and that is not quite what I intend to make mine in the Settlement House. I must confess art and history appeal so much more to me. It would be very foolish for anyone to complain of Science but—Well, I will be frank and disparage myself in your eyes—I _do_ not love Science. IT TRIES TO EXPLAIN TOO MUCH. I can’t help but think of it,” Miss Lorimer was laughing now, “as a near sighted and precise middle aged gentleman, who sees everything through his glasses which must be brought at short range with the things he is looking at. They are very clear to his eye, but they have no atmosphere, and the poetic—might I say—the religious lights, and the broad vistas escape him altogether. Labels and names, nomenclature and theories make up his life. He stumbles a good deal because he does not see very far beyond his nose, and yet I will say his intentions are excellent, and he does much good, but because he is near sighted he breaks beautiful vases filled with flowers, and puts his defacing hand on many a fresh picture.”

“Well,” retorted the Mayor, “you must admit that science has made our everyday life more healthful and convenient; that it has taught us a great deal, and influenced us to think more of just those unfortunates whom you desire to help. Would you really care to see science less powerful in this wonderful modern world?”

“Why, no,” answered the lady as the two sat down upon a bench placed in the recess of a window, “I think of science as a handmaid to the arts of life, as a purveyor of the necessities, making us comfortable and keeping us healthful. It is quite irreproachable but, can you love it?”

The Mayor’s pale face flushed, and the beautiful look returned to it which had for an instant enthralled Helen Lorimer when she met him in the City Hall. She looked at him intently. He rose as if confused or pained, and walked a few steps away. A fine Barbazon bronze stood upon a table at his elbow, and he answered, looking at this, as if finding his text somewhere in its graven lines.

“Science _does_ keep us sane and real. Romanticism, the sort the Germans encouraged two centuries ago, can hardly live in the world of science. As to loving it, those who follow science seem to surrender themselves to it with a feeling as deep, or deeper, than even Love would ask of men. It possesses them like an inspiring demon. Perhaps that abnegation of all interests to the one great call of Wisdom is only realized in the more profound and zealous, but it is there, _with them_. Why! to add one little scrap to the pages of knowledge, just to put there a new unobserved fact, imparts a curious elation. But as to Love—Ah! well love is something different.”

“Yes,” Miss Lorimer’s voice was low, as if she too had surrendered to a train of interior reflections, “love is more human than Science. It cherishes old faiths, old things, its rays are not the concentrated radiance from patent reflectors, but the old sweet sort of light that you see in a woman’s eyes.”

“Why not a man’s, also?” softly whispered the Mayor, who left his absorbed contemplation of the bronze, and stood near Miss Lorimer.

“Well—” she answered, “I suppose so too, but—it is a concession which must not be made too much of. There is good authority for believing women monopolize that kind of illumination. Do you recall Shakespeare’s adage?”

“Yes, but” retorted the young man “the same poet has put in the mouths of men the deepest and the truest things about love.”

“Of course,” laughed his companion, “men are great soothsayers. I think a very wise jester in Shakespeare averred that.

“Let me show you my meaning, the hope I have of putting in the new House, over there on the east side, something more useful to the people than labelled insects and shells and fossils. I want to have a series of rooms each one of which will be a page of history as it were, that is, a section of historic time, and, as the visitor passes from one to the next, he will feel the changing atmosphere of the rolling ages. It will be the paleontology of culture. Instead of fossils arranged to show the evolution of animals you shall here see the evolution of the human idea of living.”

“It’s a grand thought, but perhaps it is larger than the space you have to put it in,” said the Mayor.

“I think, Sir,” and the speaker moved closer to him and looked almost inquiringly into his face, “you intend to jest with me. But I will have your submission. Let me show you how well even in a small way this all can be done. I intend to do it with pictures, a few small replicas of buildings, and some figures, with just enough archeology to make the pictures and the figures real. Be patient with my good intentions and remember I have chosen you for my ally.”

“There are some reserved rights of criticism for an ally,” said the Mayor, taking up the border of a tapestry which hung near them. “But I should be, I fear, a poor critic. My allegiance is too unquestioning.”

“Well you shall have privileges. In my scheme there are aspects of civics to be considered. That will be your affair.”

“Perhaps,” the Mayor whispered in serio-comic tone, “We ought really to consult Briggs?”

Helen laughed outright; “OH! that Cerberus. No, indeed. He would discover some means to ruin all my plans. He is implacable. He will not forgive me his discomfiture at the Hall. He sees in me the embodiment of a rabid useless philanthropy which is about as bad in his eyes as the red Jacobinism he fears in the _sans culottes_. But you approve of me don’t you?”

The speaker turned upon the young man the appealing beauty of her face and the gesture was too significant not to escape the jealous attention of her hearer, who never felt so happy.

“Miss Lorimer, my admiration of what you are attempting is a good deal deeper than approval. I think I am not careless in using words, when I say that I love you for what you are doing and have done.”

A red tide of color flushed Helen Lorimer’s face, her eyes sought the floor, and the Mayor looked at her with a wondering smile, which was an excellent index of his feeling that his words were not resented. There was a short silence and then Miss Lorimer rose, and moved towards the opposite end of the long room, while she half turned and invited the Mayor to follow.

“I have indeed made a step forward in my plan. Come and see the Egyptian phase. I call these phases of civilization—chapters. It is the great book of life I wish to show these people, as if the human mind advanced in cycles of development, and each of these cycles was a chapter in a continuous history. There will be rooms, each room a chapter, each chapter successional to the others that precede it. But that is not all—not all—I have so much to show you.”

They stopped a moment at the door of a room, which when opened, revealed a half arranged assortment of maps, pictures, models, apparel, with a number of stereoscopic cameras, and relievos, all illustrating scenes, customs, and the ruins of Egypt. There were here great portfolios filled with drawings, photographs, and colored sketches. A number of well made relief maps showed the configuration of the ancient country, while small but exquisitely executed restorations of temples, propylons, sphinxes, obelisks, occupied a table in the middle of the apartment. There was the usual miscellaneous assortment of scarabaei, glass vessels, vases, mortuary images, ises, and one sarcophagus.

Miss Lorimer viewed them all with pride, though she was silent for an instant as if estimating the forlorn confusion among these crowded reminders of the past; but her embarrassment quickly vanished.

“I shall try,” she said, contemplating with a little perplexity the disarray of objects, “with these types, and with books and labels—yes with poetry and epigrams—to set before the people a picture, a restoration of Old Egypt. If they can be made to realize its awful distance from our modern variegation, its monolithic cryptic strangeness, if they can feel the breath of its exaggerated egotism, and the weird pantheistic aspirations of its religions, or catch in an imaginative picture its stolid immensity of architectural violence, will that not be an education? Suppose I can draw them along from room or hall to other rooms and halls, each one the concentration of the idea of a peculiar culture, as the Greeks, the Romans, the Mediaeval, the Mahommetan, the Indian and, expanding as they move upward to our modern day, into treatment of nations or races, as cultural units what a breadth of well defined impressions I can make!

“I can invite them into beautiful avenues of thought, recreating by the spell of portraiture and language these obliterated complexes of ideation; the Egyptian aridity and monumental titanism, the art and limpidity of Greece, the strength and legal emphasis of Rome, and then may I not attempt somehow to show the warming power of Christianity by which our hearts become susceptible to all beauty, for Christianity Sir, unlocked the treasury of Sympathies we possess with all life.”

There was something very lovely in Helen Lorimer when her enthusiasm—always easily evoked—kindled, and the young Mayor thought nothing in the form of lovely woman could be more captivating. He was less attentive to her plans as he watched her, than he was thoughtfully wondering with himself how impossible it was for him to control his own feelings, and then again how far away from him seemed the radiant gifted and noble woman whose voice rose to him with a penetrating sweetness, and whose eyes met his with challenging sincerity. Curiously he found himself retracing the steps of his own life, so that while he listened, while he watched—and watching loved—some hidden operative power of thought reviewed the toiling days he had gone through, and his divided attention, like a rider on two horses, noticed Miss Lorimer’s ideals—probably a little vaguely—and his own struggles amid deprivations and against obstacles—perhaps a little acutely.

He saw himself the child of humble parents—his father being a bookkeeper and his mother a lady of simple birth—who had grown rapidly and was devoured by a passion for place. At school he fought with his schoolmates for the best position in the school base-ball team, in the class room he engaged every power he possessed of self-control to seize and hold the first place. He admitted this superiority came easily, his lessons were quickly and well learned, and his physical skill, the celerity of his movement, were ungrudgingly acknowledged by less successful rivals. His disposition—he was not embarrassed in making the confession—was genial and loving, with traces of irritability, and though his worsted opponents might regret their failures, somehow—if the individual was not too cross grained and unforgiving—he could coax them back into good humor and even make his own victory serviceable to their needs.

But he must be on top; the rage for conquest burned fiercely in his boyish heart, and this ambition kept him restlessly aggressive. He bounded through the grammar school, he leaped over the grades in the High School, as if, figuratively, he was an acrobat bursting paper rings. Then he flashed through the City College, and his coruscating transit remained a vivid bewilderment to the faculty and his class mates. But he was always poor. He came home after the day’s exciting experiences to a very simple home life, wherein the delicate and sweet figure of his patiently toiling Mother, like a consecration, deepened his love, and brought feverish resolves in his mind to lift her, his father, and himself into affluence.

He had not indeed gained riches, but he had won _place_, the highest in the city-state, and before him opened untrodden vistas of ascending power, social and financial. After graduating from college he studied law. His wit and energy, the tireless practice of self imposed tasks, his utter absorption in the thing at hand, bore the customary fruit. He won out easily, and before a bench of jurists delivered an oration—argumentative, speculative, and didactic—on the claims of socialism that almost brought that deliberative body to its feet, and for an instant endangered its dignity by an irruption of hand-clapping. His subsequent course had been persistently upward. Prestige, reputation, employment were naturally gained. And finally as he wished it, the offer of the nomination for governor was tendered to him, and art and opportunity combined to seat him in the governor’s chair.

He had done well, the rewards were not undeservingly allotted; no man exerted more relentlessly his ability to work, or aimed higher in the standards of excellence his ambition proposed to his skill. Yet—the opposition is unusual—with this incessant application for success, under the good of his own unappeasable thirst for place, he displayed a most irrelevant modesty. It was an almost unsupportable personal enigma. A man ruthlessly overcoming opposition, battling like a maniac for position, and yet at the surcease of effort declining into self-effacement. It seemed to his friends a neurological accident; it was nervous exhaustion and they looked upon it as a dangerous symptom of a physical decay.

As the Mayor thus mused, still retaining in his ears and mind the lavish picture that Miss Lorimer was drawing, he felt again the challenge to a new sort of conquest. Could he capture the heart, the hand, of this famous woman, the soul of an aristocratic coterie—a Hypatia indeed, upon whose shoulders dwelt the prestige of wealth and talent, and yet one mingling her daily life with the currents of the people’s lives in the ministrations of mercy, of education.

How amazingly acceptable to him—a man eager to disenthrall the commonality from the sordid commonplaces of their lives, and bring to them the assets of an intellectual endowment—was this condescension. And yet he secretly but acutely augured that he and Miss Lorimer were separated by a deep moral hostility. Helen Lorimer dwelt wholly within the borders of a severe and ecstatic religious faith, and he—Ah! how should he reconcile to her his repudiation of all creed, the complete erasure from his heart of all faith and the bleak hardihood of his reiterated negations before the fabric and the vouchers of the Church?

The Mayor was enrolled among those who accept the scientific conduct of life, who look along the years ahead of them as periods of duration to be used discreetly, but who spurned the illusion of any forbearance from above, any posture of agreement with a God, any dream of perpetuation beyond the pit and doom of death. Perhaps he felt the authority and corrective uses of the Church, but like Napoleon who saw in the Concordat a political compact and nothing more, he appreciated its invincible excellence as a police guarantee for ORDER.

He could not have said with Napoleon, “I do not believe in religions, _but in the idea of a God_;” he believed in neither. To the world about him, to the men of daily intercourse he was reticent. He respected the rights of conviction, and he knew their value. But with this new aspect of life delightfully developing before him, with the ingratiating companionship of a woman’s heart and soul, leading him into untraversed joys—and such a woman—could there safely be long concealment? He saw how immensely earnest she was, that perhaps she in a measure lived for invisible realities; should he hesitate to be frank?

Well at any rate there was now no need for brutal, disconcerting, confessions; let Love have her perfect way at first, and let reconcilement follow later. His present happiness was too great to be disturbed by shocks of disagreement. He was quite ready to fight hard for the splendid prize, and strategy—though he despised mean motives—was a legitimate resource.

There was a short silence which might have left an unpleasant impression upon the lady had it been continued, when the Mayor spoke; “It is a splendid thought, but can you realize it, as you wish; can you make these people understand? I suppose too, there is an ulterior aim, something outside of the mere literary or poetic image of these superseded cultures. What is that?”

“Oh, there will be much more than my museum. There will be instructions, lectures and these must all conform to a definite progressive training in the idea of the improved modern state over all these decadent and vanished social states. I wish to show the rise of the conception and the realization under our modern forms of government of property; I want to accentuate the individualistic idea, the definite personal progression, by which the whole community rises to higher things, and I want to give that all a christian imprint, because I believe that the christian formula is the only one that fits the requirements of our day, as I believe that they have always fitted the requirements of every day.

“The vagaries and the perplexities of men would vanish if they could all feel—rich and poor alike—the dissolving efficacy of Love, mutual toleration, mutual forbearance, and if too in accordance with the hierarchical type of the Church they could feel the necessary relations of higher and lower in the social scale. The socialists are levellers: they would crop all men short to one height and that the shortest; the wonderful picture of our world with its atmosphere and relief would all become like a Chinese drawing, all foreground, out of proportion and distorted.”

The Mayor was hearing very carefully now, and he was looking at the speaker with a flushed face—the index of some sudden resolution—his hands folded before him and his lips just slightly tightened—a further assurance of a forming determination.

“It will surprise you, Miss Lorimer, but _I_ am a socialist in a way, and perhaps you will remonstrate with me if I say that I would invoke the traditions and the teachings of Christianity to convince you, that you ought to be one too—_in a way_.”

The speaker was now smiling with a deferential suggestion of not wishing to be misunderstood or rebuked. When he looked that way he was at his best, and Helen Lorimer forsook her dogmatism and answered back with a strange girlish sweetness and yearning; “Ah! please: You wish to confuse me. Tell me just what you mean, and tell me too how you can be a socialist and say the things you said to me at the City Hall when I came to you to crave mercy for socialists. I think I can undeceive you as to Christianity being socialistic—in your sense.”

The Mayor sat down and leaning on the arm of his chair spoke slowly, softly, without ostentation, and with an earnestness that was the outpouring of his deepest convictions.

“Christianity must, I think, be socialistic in all senses. What does it pretend to be, to do? Surely it is not solely a Gospel of Preparation, it is also a Gospel of Life; this life, this weary work-a-day world, with its inequalities, its disrupting accidents, its amazing wildernesses of need, of sickness, of despair, of the manifold disorganizing vagaries of temper, and of the vast Upas Tree of evil.

“Is it not meant to meet all that and help it? How can it be done? I think in one way only. By preaching the essential community of all the productive powers of the state, by helping to make society a vast machine, if you will, running smoothly like a perfect machine, with all its parts coordinated, adjusted, registered, inter-active, reciprocating. Christianity should denounce the tyranny of the individual and the individualistic conceit. Society organized upon individualization is organized upon Greed. The principle of individualism is the feral type, the manner of wild nature, of preying and carnivorous appetite; it is the struggle, internecine, sanguinary, continuing, wherein the strongest survives and it alone.

“Christianity I take you mean to assert, is a superinduced order at war with nature, intended to overcome nature even to the extent of exterminating its normal instincts,” the voice speaking became as it were stealthily murmurous for an instant, and then it rose again sonorous and persuasive.

“Can I care, can you care, can anyone care, whether an industrial metamorphosis like this strikes at the roots of literature and art, so long as it means redemption, elevation, and happiness for Humanity? _The main fact about life is living._ Should we not be more interested in making the world absolutely habitable for the millions that are in it, than in furnishing subjects to art and letters, because it is tragic and disappointing; full now of dark shadows and high lights too sharply contrasted conditions, too dangerous abysses and too risky peaks?

“Art of the kind we have known, and literature of the kind we have read, might be discouraged in an earth absolutely at peace, absolutely happy, absolutely comfortable, absolutely _bourgeoise_, if you will. But perhaps some other sorts of art and writing might appear. It is not easy to stagnate the human mind, but if its activity depends on the misery of the human heart then let it stagnate.

“And your Christianity, why is it not socialistic? It began so. Your Christ, observe Miss Lorimer I will be abjectly honest, not mine—_your_ Christ told the rich man to give all he had to the poor and to follow him;” at these words Helen Lorimer seemed to quiver as if with a sort of terror, still her eyes never left the speaker’s face, and because they dwelt so courageously upon his own the speaker surrendered himself to the sway of his impulse, without reservation, driven on by the novel inspiration of imposing upon the splendid being in front of him by his own indomitable frankness.

“Why can not the civilized minds of the world get together and establish some sort of a vast homogeneity, some standards of co-operative living, an international fusion, a set of rules governing every aspect of life, at least so far as rules will. Let it be a machine made society, machine run, but like a perfect machine running smoothly with oiled parts, with certainty, and exquisitely effective, from top to bottom clean and happy.”

The Mayor ended but Miss Lorimer continued her fixed gaze at least for a moment longer; that ended too as she rose, withdrew a little, passing her hands over a cleverly reconstructed mimic sphinx. The young man’s face had resumed its paleness, but his eyes shone; their eagerness was not unnoticed, and when Helen Lorimer after a minute’s indecision returned, and stood near him, his expression changed from its challenging confidence, and grew quietly grave, and then he looked at her with a queer questioning humility:

“Do I offend you? You will not think less of me, will you, if I have been sincere? As to your visit to the City Hall in the interest of these unfortunate men, and my stubbornness there, that has nothing to do with my convictions. Perhaps I have not much sympathy with the Longtinsky type, and at any rate his ideals, if he has any, are not mine, and Order, Security, Law must be continued at all hazards. I do not think that chaos will form a desirable introduction to a perfect state.”

“No indeed, Mr. Mayor,” returned Miss Lorimer, a smile struggling upward in features that had become a little daunted and astonished with his unexpected ardor and confession; “No. I could feel no offense—but somehow I cannot think you are right. Society is not mechanical; you cannot make it so. In my mind christian society is an organization, whose life—I mean its spiritual vitality—is religion, and let me too be frank—the religion of the Catholic Church; an organism with parts, functions, and these of high and low degree though all serviceable to one end—and bearing the blossom and fruit of character.

“Perhaps you will say an organism is socialistic—that our own bodies with their various parts are socialistic. Well—perhaps—and yet—” the speaker reflectively looked at the Mayor with a puzzled honest glance, which brought the pleasantest of smiles into his face, and with a little gentle laugh he hastened to increase her confusion:

“Of course—if any living thing were not a socialistic compound, it would fall to pieces. All of its organs must become fraternally united, fraternally active, fraternally sound: if they compete with each other, if they engage in self assertions of independence, and begin a war upon each other, they are no longer fraternal but fratricidal. Has not most society, as we read of it in history, been just that?”

Miss Lorimer did not seem to be convinced. The problem “gave her pause,” and the half pained, half amused indecision in her face served naturally to make the Mayor and herself better acquainted. Indeed it pushed them forward to a very close mental companionship. Miss Lorimer’s brow cleared, her eyes lost their humorous dismay, she felt the grip of argument and flung back her answer with almost a vindictive taunt.

“But society can be social without being socialistic; individual initiative does not forbid mutual toleration, help, recognition. Will you kill the principle of property that it has taken so long to form, formed too by bloodshed, heroism of all sorts, invention and patience? The savage is a socialist, the despot is one too, and tyrannies are socialistic. The goad to effort is the prospect of possible possession. Your socialistic society will be a sponge, made of innumerable identical monads, not a Ship of State moving on to new lands, new hopes, new treasures.”

“No simile will help you,” retorted the Mayor, who was enjoying himself, who felt the thrills of a deepening friendship with the woman before him, deepened too by just such an amiable and thoughtful contest, “the Ship is itself a socialistic State. Each man who is on it has his work, his pay, and lives on the winnings of the voyage. Socialism does not preclude promotion, nor to my mind, property, but it greatly equalizes the chances of having anything at all for those who to-day have nothing.

“As a child without liberty, a man, supported by his family, lives, the imprudences or accidents of his life deprive him of support when he becomes of age and is given liberty. Liberty to five or six men out of ten means destruction. Let the State once become a family, and all of its children live, for it will be a family rich enough to support them. The best, the smartest, if you will, the most able will control, but not altogether for themselves. They will no longer use their wits to get the best of those around them—as I have, as others do—for selfish reasons. They will be saved from themselves. Greatness of character, that I know Miss Lorimer you adore, will not be diminished because struggle—that is the hard, sordid, internecine—conflict sort—ceases; greatness of character will be apportioned more liberally to many. And there will be struggle enough. No ideal state can escape it; struggle against sin, sickness, disease, ignorance, waste, revolt, prejudice, against storm, earthquake the viciousness of nature. Only by a process of unification, consolidation, can the race burst its bonds, and reach Utopia. You say, it is a dream—perhaps—but dreams have lifted men to Heaven.”

Miss Lorimer hesitated for one instant, but a new light of appreciation entered her face; the Mayor had won—something—and perhaps much.

“Well, Mr. Mayor, you press it strongly, and because it now comes to me under a different guise, let me suspend judgment. You may teach me more—but surely individual responsibility cannot carelessly be forgotten, and with me, back of everything is the Church. Bonald has written that society does not consist of the walls of our houses or the ramparts of our towns but that wherever a human being is found there is a father, a mother, a child, a language, heaven, earth, God and a religion.”

A shadow of pain crossed the face of the young man. He rose from his chair, stooped towards Miss Lorimer, who had sat down and in a voice that vibrated with a distinct suggestion of sorrow, said: “You may teach me what you can about the Church, but to me it seems unlikely that the Church stands so stubbornly for things as they are.”

“The Church revolutionized the world. It brought into action all the unselfish sentiments you appeal to. The culture in sympathy it has given to the world makes your Socialism possible. Besides” Miss Lorimer grew more beautiful before his face, as some transfiguring grace of Hope and Faith rested on her, and gave her an indefinable sweetness, “the Church gazes beyond the rim of this earth. Its feet stand on the earth but its head is above the clouds. You remember Virgil’s image:

_Ingreditur que solo, et caput inter nubila condit?_”

The Mayor laughed, “Ah, yes, Miss Lorimer, but for most practical purposes it is best to keep our eyes fastened on the ground. Really star gazing seldom helps us to walk straight. But do not rebuke me, I understand. I do indeed, and I would not do myself such harm in your eyes as to appear to be cynical.”

A swinging window frame pushed by a softly rising breeze borne to them from the river, swung back, and the delicious summer air, fragrant and warm, blew in upon them, breathing its delicate febrile sensuousness, and almost—as if a voice, by some disembodiment only present to their interior sense, had spoken—summoning them to come out into the night The window opened upon one of the broad balconies which encircled the mansion at this attic story, and as they both looked to the portal caught by a common sense of interest in the pleasant draught of air, the moonlight also smote the floor, though barely seen in the lighted room. It came from the full moon that now had floated upward over Long Island, and inundated the outspread city with a golden glow, whose burnish only rested here and there where it was not repelled by the electric aureole below it, withdrawing timidly from the spaces bathed in the nether glow of its terrestrial rival.

As it happened the room in which they were, was at the north end of the villa, and at that point occurred one of the gaps in the artificial illumination of the city upon which, as if by its own preemption, the disheartened moonlight still presumingly remained unchallenged. The invitation met their wishes. This personal collision of opinion was out of place that glorious night. The Mayor dearly wished to have done with it, earnest as he was, and just then his heart rebelled against this intellectual coercion. And why was it that Helen Lorimer wistfully gazed at the shrinking intrusion of the wisps of moonlight, and rose obediently to the same unuttered welcome to the outer night? It was a quaint incident that they both rose and walked toward the open window, and they both laughed a little. It seemed to help. Louder laughter came to their ears from the river, where flaming barges sailed with bursts of music, and waifs of song, bewitched—however crude they were—into delightsome sound by the melting amiable night. They could see the opposite banks of the noble stream where the Palisades, formed then into a reservation, showed their columnar masses weirdly glistening, for on them fell the moonlight with the peccant light of the wavering electrical auroras.

“May we sit here?” said the Mayor.

“The night is too lovely to be missed, and this view of the valley and those far distant Van Cortlandt towers is wonderful; it always is. Ah, and the air boats are abroad to-night,” and the speaker pointed upward to the arrowy trails of light, and the Mayor listened to the hum of the aeroplanes.

The chairs were brought out by the Mayor, and the two sat down silent for an instant, startled by the strangeness of their abandonment to the scarcely felt intuition of a mutual recognition.

Below them shone the lamps in an oval courtyard, where sanded paths wound about slender marble pillars, amid stunted and clipped fig trees, where clambering eglantine masked the stone pedestals on which the electric lights glowed, all caught in the embrace of a peristyle whose seats also looked off to the glinting waters of the river. They could see the outstretched roofs of the many mansions of Carrara and flaring on the horizon many steeply rising flames of light, issuing from the monuments in Van Cortlandt Park, like sentinels, along the ridgy back of the Mosholu.

“The world is a task master that it is hard to please.” It was the Mayor’s voice, and the accusing tone seemed sad with some ulterior meaning; he continued: “I mean in all our vocations we fail to meet expectations.”

“Because the world expects too much; it is always looking for an idol and an ideal. We all do. It is better to be disappointed in what we do than to be destitute of ambitions. But the end of the matter is that this world is insufficient. It is provisional, probational, and the prelude of completer states.

“_The flower that smiles to-day To-morrow dies All that we wish to stay Tempts and then flies. What is this world’s delight? Lightning that mocks the night, Brief even as bright._”

“Those are Shelley’s words,” answered the Mayor, “I know them; but they are vitiated by an obliquity of thought. The flower that fades, the fleeting pleasure, the thought—quick lightning, are beautiful, _because_ they vanish, because they are the transports of a moment, because they are figures in the shimmering flying weave of things. It is the marvel of change that helps us to live, and it is a progressive change, too, an eternally upward march. The vanished delights are only replaced by better ones.”

“_So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old darkness._

“And _with_ us, as eternal souls, the fresh perfection is Paradise or Heaven.” Again there was a silence, and the Mayor’s face was turned to the speaker gazing so intently with perhaps, could it have been narrowly determined, a haunting wonder and amused delight, as if he prized in her the power of faith, so dead in his own heart. But he intended to concede nothing:

“The thought is pleasant, but is it true? Is it not wiser to submit to our limitations, to bow the neck to the necessitous hardship of our place and not too fondly dwell in dreams?”

“Our limitations are made by ourselves. There can be no necessary limit to belief, if we will but listen.”

“Listen—listen to what?” the voice trembled a little.

“Well I will not say the Church—the Revelation—but listen to the desires within us. Surely it is as legitimate to believe our hopes as to set up our Despair, and worship that.”

“No,” answered the Mayor, “not Despair but Negation—and not set up as an idol, but like an inner controlling voice—like our conscience, if you will—whispering warnings against intoxicating fancies, against too warm and vaporous delusions, that will make us incapable and foolish. Let the Promethean age come, but it can only come by effort, work, thought, not by submission to veiled and luxurious promises.”

The voice was not hard or strained, nor was there any suspicion of defiance in it; if anything, there was in it, to the ears of the listener—and the listener was alert, eager, yearning even—an admonition of gentle remonstrance only.

“If Christianity does not mean effort, work, thought, I do not know what it means; and the Promethean age, will it come on this earth, and as we are? Can it? Does it help to murmur with the Cenci:

“_If there should be No God, no heaven, no earth, in the void world, The wide grey lampless deep unpeopled world?_

And are dreams so useless? In what harbor of refuge do we crave to enter when we sleep, if it is not pleasant dreams. And is not even sleep itself necessary? If doubt and angry questionings are to fill our lives with turmoil, can we work at all? There must be a foothold somewhere, somehow, a ground level where our new ambitions rise.”

“Hardly,” the Mayor answered quickly, and his voice rose with that peculiar sweetness of tone that fell on Helen Lorimer’s ears like music, “Work for work’s sake is ground enough; bettering conditions, giving beauty to the world, hastening the conquest of nature, mastering power, dispelling disease, winning knowledge, conquering the silence and oppression of things, rising eternally to far off dispensations of greater and greater power. Man’s ultimatum is the world and what he can make of _it_, and _himself_.

“_The lightning is his slave; heavens utmost deep Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on! The tempest is his steed, he strides the air; And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare, Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none._”

“And yet—there remains Death. Will you conquer Him? And Age and Sorrow? Does Knowledge and Power mean everything, do they mean anything without companionship and Love?” Miss Lorimer stopped, checked by a sudden embarrassment, her words carried meanings which stirred her blood, and her instinct told her too acutely it was for both of them dangerous going—just there; the word she had uttered seemed even then to her like some torch which, inconsiderately dropped, lights the eager dry prairies when the wind is rising. Perhaps it was such; her own heart leaped strangely, an unwonted warmth flowed stealthily yet urgently through her body, and the whispering summer night bore to her ears its undulous distant sounds, as if they were faintly calling to her to follow the new summons of a new joy, opening before her, rich, splendid, and fathomless. She leaned on the balustrade of the balcony, and watched the sky, shamed by some untoward concussion of her being, unknown before, discovered in this last instant, as when a man walking in the night enters a disk of illumination which reveals himself and his position, and startled, he finds another step reaches a brink of peril.

And what were these serious words that came now to her ears, moving faster and faster, breathed, she seemed to feel, almost upon her cheeks, eloquent with conviction; prayers they were—and such prayers!—not as she knew them in her Church—tapers of devotion—but prayers from an adoring man’s heart, that smote her own as caresses; how willingly she let them enter there, where she stored all her aspirations, secret treasures of affection, and her own best resolves!

And now when they were in, how proud they grew, holding that inner citadel of her own as theirs and staunchly possessing the whole place! But this was surrender—she must eject them, push them out from those uninvaded precincts, and close the doors again, or else—Oh how desolating it was to have those wicked prayers within, believing themselves welcome, and acting so importunately the parts of welcomed guests. Oh for some stalwart hand to rid her of them, to send them backward, stumbling backward, unrewarded, repelled, killed—No! No! not killed; that were inhuman; just ordered off and out Forever?

Ah, well, let them stand off awhile. This haste is insolence, worse, ingratitude; let these clustering rampant prayers become more formal, more respectful, less rapacious with their stormy signals and provocations. There must be decorum, a slow approach, the signs of parley and convention. These prayers are blatant, blustering, overbearing; they have entered an open door and—now—once in, they will not out. Oh, God!—they are indeed too cruel!

Her Pride, that glorious mistress of her heart tells them to leave, and they do not stir. They taunt her, they seize her, tie her chaste hands—Merciful Heavens must it be so!—and throw _her_ out, and then—these perfidious demons!—smile at their conquest, dry their beseeching eyes, and inhabit unmoved that dear shrine of her soul wherein she thought no steps should ever tread but those of Memory and Faith. Has it been made so rare and lovely for this profanation—Oh, Mother of Sorrows hear;—and Helen Lorimer’s head sank upon her arms, on the stone railing, and she sobbed, and in her sobs the prayers still repeated themselves, and now stood like pitiful supplicants—no longer bold or careless—and she put her hands forward to them, and pressed them to her breast. Suddenly they all were dear to her; she would not have lost one! No, they should not go; the place was theirs; her heart received them, and kept them. And these were the prayers.

“Yes, Love and Companionship, those accompany the best effort. They are the linked comrades who hold up the arms while the battle rages, who press to our lips the chalice which feeds our strength, who fold us in their arms when the victory is won and who bring sleep to our wearied brain. Oh, have I not yearned for that shelter and encouragement! But neither Church nor Religion could bring to me that aid. Pardon me Miss Lorimer, but the empty voices of a Church, or the old reiterations of a creed are not the Love nor the Companionship a man craves; Oh, something much nearer the inmost inscrutable needs of his nature. Surely your own heart tells you and if—no restraint can withhold this confession Miss Lorimer—I tell you now that I love you, that I have with a fixed unswerving, tireless determination, meant to say this all to you. It is an effrontery for me to speak now, but you touched the overflowing stream of feeling, and it has burst its bounds. Do not disdain me for it; do not let this error, this rashness, foil or hurt me in your approval.

“I beg you to listen, to let the open chance be mine to win you, to forgive this advantage of opportunity I have taken. Hear my promises. I will not molest you; I will prove my love; I will be patient if you can be. You turn away. Are you astonished? Do you feel resentment? Oh say that you do not. Say that I am forgiven, that you will let me see you often. It is a priceless boon for me to know you. The thought of you has grown daily in my mind, until it has become an overmastering desire and adoration. I have lived a barren and struggling life among men, cut off by the relentless pressure of work from the priceless joys of womanly culture. And yet I do not know that matters now. I rejoice that it has been so, for as you have entered my life you come with all the more abounding blessedness of promises, I have until this moment, never dreamed of.

“Speak to me one word—just this—that this sudden loss of restraint is forgiven. I do not know, I did not dream—that I would be so hopelessly swept off my feet. I meant no harm, by every throb of my poor bewildered heart I meant none. Miss Lorimer, I love you, and though that love were born but yesterday, a century would not make it greater. Do you despise me because I cannot believe as you believe? I know that you honor candor, just common honesty—no soul so upright as yours could do otherwise—and I have been candid. Does that seem wrong? I am willing to learn all things. Let me learn from you.”

The head of the sobbing woman before him was raised, its tears were wiped away and the figure that bore it rose, and then the eyes—those wondrous, burning, searching, welcoming eyes—were turned to his, and on that face was born—as if from the enchantment of his own words—a smile, and somehow the young man knew that it was the gesture of permission, and he bowed before the splendor of that beauty, while his heart stood still, engulfed in its own unutterable hopes.