that dark business at all. As he threaded the deserted streets--it was
long after midnight--he planned a dinner to be given in his rooms the
next day, and formulated a note of invitation to the ladies, which he
would write when he got back to the hotel, and have in readiness for
early delivery in the morning.

Lynde was in one of those lightsome moods which, in that varying month,
had not unfrequently followed a day of doubt and restless despondency.
As he turned into the Quai des Bergues he actually hummed a bar or two
of opera. He had not done that before in six weeks. They had been weeks
of inconceivable torment and pleasure to Lynde.

He had left home while still afflicted by David Lynde's death. Since the
uncle's ill-advised marriage the intercourse between them, as the reader
knows, had all but ceased; they had met only once, and then as if to bid
each other farewell; but the ties had been very close, after all. In the
weeks immediately following his guardian's death, the young man,
occupied with settling the estate, of which he was one of the executors,
scarcely realized his loss; but when he returned to Rivermouth a heavy
sense of loneliness came over him. The crowded, happy firesides to which
he was free seemed to reproach him for his lack of kinship; he stood
alone in the world; there was no more reason why he should stay in one
place than in another. His connection with the bank, unnecessary now
from a money point of view, grew irksome; the quietude of the town
oppressed him; he determined to cut adrift from all and go abroad. An
educated American with no deeper sorrow than Lynde's cannot travel
through Europe, for the first time at least, with indifference. Three
months in Germany and France began in Lynde a cure which was completed
by a winter in Southern Italy. He had regained his former elasticity of
spirits and was taking life with a relish, when he went to Geneva; there