"WHEN HALF-GODS GO, THE GODS ARRIVE."


"What a beautiful girl!" said Mr. Ambrose Drayton to himself; "and how
much she looks like--" He cut the comparison short, and turned his eyes
seaward, pulling at his mustache meditatively the while.

"This American atmosphere, fresh and pure as it is in the nostrils, is
heavy-laden with reminiscences," his thoughts ran on. "Reminiscences,
but always with differences, the chief difference being, no doubt, in
myself. And no wonder. Nineteen years; yes, it's positively nineteen
years since I stood here and gazed out through yonder gap between the
headlands. Nineteen years of foreign lands, foreign men and manners,
the courts, the camps, the schools; adventure, business, and pleasure--
if I may lightly use so mysterious a word. Nineteen and twenty are
thirty-nine; in my case say sixty at least. Why, a girl like that
lovely young thing walking away there with her light step and her
innocent heart would take me to be sixty to a dead certainty. A rather
well-preserved man of sixty--that's how she'd describe me to the young
fellow she's given her heart to. Well, sixty or forty, what difference?
When a man has passed the age at which he falls in love, he is the peer
of Methuselah from that time forth. But what a fiery season that of
love is while it lasts! Ay, and it burns something out of the soul that
never grows again. And well that it should do so: a susceptible heart
is a troublesome burden to lug round the world. Curious that I should
be even thinking of such things: association, I suppose. Here it was