passing so swiftly, and pained that they were filled less and less
with thoughts of Easter. With a pang of remorse and fear, he
determined to go back to the mountains as soon as his father came
home. He knew the effect of habit. He would forget these
pleasures felt so keenly now, as he had once forgotten them, and
he would leave before their hold upon him was secure.

Knowing the danger that beset him, Puritan that he was, he had
avoided it all he could. He even stopped his daily visits to the
club, and spent most of his time at home with his mother and
sister. Once only, to his bitter regret, was he induced to go out.
Wagner's tidal wave had reached New York; it was the opening
night of the season, and the opera was one that he had learned to love in Germany. The very brilliancy of the scene threw him into gloom, so aloof did he feel from it all-the great theatre aflame with lights, the circling tiers of faces, the pit with its hundred musicians, their eyes on the leader, who stood above them
with baton upraised and German face already aglow.

In his student days he had loved music, but he had little more than
trifled with it; now, strangely enough, his love, even his
understanding, seemed to have grown; and when the violins
thrilled all the vast space into life, he was shaken with a passion
newly born. All the evening he sat riveted. A rush of memories
came upon him-memories of his student life, with its dreams and
ideals of culture and scholarship, which rose from his past again
like phantoms. In the elevation of the moment the trivial pleasures
that had been tempting him became mean and unworthy. With a
pang of bitter regret he saw himself as he might have been, as he
yet might be.

A few days later his father came home, and his distress of mind
was complete. Clayton need stay in the mountains but little
longer, he said; he was fast making up his losses, and he had hoped