repeated the fact slowly. Did he mean it as a call to him?

Andrew's eyes glowed. He could see it all, with its difficulties and its
possibilities. He rested his clenched hand on the table and the artist in
him had the run of his pulses. He could see it all and he knew in all
humbleness that he could construct the town as no other man of his
generation would be able to do; the beautiful hill-rimmed city!

And just as potent he felt the call of the half-awakened spirit of art
and letters that had lain among them poverty-bound for forty
reconstructive years. For what had he been so richly dowered? To sing
his songs from the camp of a wanderer and write his plays with a foreign
flavor, when he might voice his own people in the world of letters, his
own with their background of traditions and tragedy and their foreground
of rough-hewn possibilities? Was not the meed of his fame, small or
large, theirs?

Suddenly the tension snapped and sadness chilled through his veins. Here
there would always be that memory which brought its influences of
bitterness and depression to kill the creative in him. The old mad desire
to be gone and away from it beat up into his blood, then stilled on the
instant. What was it that caught his breath in his breast at the thought
of exile? Could he go now, _could_--

Just at this moment he was interrupted by Mrs. Matilda who came hurrying
into the room with ribbons and veil aflutter. She evidently had only the
moment to stay and she took in his decorative schemes with the utmost
delight.

"Andrew," she said with enthusiasm in every tone, "it is all lovely,