He made sure that the picture and its setting would be a lasting memory, and the sight of it brought back a swelling wave of recollection that went nigh to submerging him. There was the piano, where he had so often stood beside her, turning the leaves of her music while she played for him. In the corner, where the cross light from the windows could be shaded and controlled from her chair, stood her easel--the workbench before which she had spent so many patient hours. On the wall opposite, hanging just where she could see it while she worked, was the little Vedder--his one valuable gift; and beside the fire, which was now burning brightly, stood the easy-chair which had come to be called his, so often had he claimed it. Some such background he had always imagined for his own home--the home wherein he could escape from the growing responsibilities of his work; the home which Isabel was to make for him. But she had said it could never be, and she was sending him away without hope, and with nothing but the remembrance of her pity to fill the place she had made for herself in his life. She might have kissed him once, he thought, and the thought set itself in words before he could check it. “It couldn’t have made much difference to you, Isabel; a kiss is only a little thing. And yet I had an idea that if you gave me one the remembrance of it would tide me over some of the hard places. That was all.” Her eyes met his when he began to say it, but she neither saw nor heard him when he went away. When she looked up and found him gone she ran to the door to call him back, but she was not quick enough. The night had swallowed him, and when she made sure of it she went back to the studio to bury her face in the lounge pillows and to cry bitterly--for what, she knew not, save that her world seemed suddenly to have fallen out of its orbit. Thus the maid. And the man? As Brant had left the same house a few nights earlier with the devil beckoning him, so went Antrim, stumbling over the curb at the crossing and splashing through the pools made by the overflowing irrigation ditches without once realizing the discomfort. It was mirth for the gods, doubtless. His trouble was only a microscopic bit of side play in the great human comedy. But it was tragic enough to the young man, and many a spoiled life answers to promptings no more insistent than those which gather, buzzardlike, to pick the bones of a starved passion. In the ruck of it Antrim tramped wearily back to the city, unmindful of all the familiarities until some one spoke to him at the corner of Sixteenth and Larimer Streets. It was Grotter, the division engineer, and he linked arms with the chief clerk and caught step.