the
carefully chosen pictures that hung above them seemed to have
lost
their attraction. He paused for a moment before an idyll of
Corot--a dance
of nymphs around some forgotten altar in a vaporous glade--and
looked at
it curiously. There was something rapturous and serene about the
picture,
a breath of spring-time in the misty trees, a harmony of joy in
the dancing figures, that wakened in him a feeling of
half-pleasure
and half-envy. It represented something that he had never known
in his
calculated, orderly life. He was dimly mistrustful of it.

"It is certainly very beautiful," he thought, "but it is
distinctly pagan;
that altar is built to some heathen god. It does not fit into
the scheme of a Christian life. I doubt whether it is consistent
with
the tone of my house. I will sell it this winter. It will bring

three or four times what I paid for it. That was a good
purchase,
a very good bargain."

He dropped into the revolving chair before his big library table.

It was covered with pamphlets and reports of the various