It was one of the last of the days of a celestial June. Bayard had lived the month of blossoms out eagerly and restlessly. His work had grown enormously upon his hands, and required an attention which told on every nerve. He had gone headlong into the depths of one of those dedications which do not give a man time to come up for air. His eye wore an elate, rapt look. His cheeks burned with a fine fever. His personal beauty that summer was something at which the very “dock-rats” on the wharves turned back to look. No woman easily forgot it, and how many secretly dreamed of it, fortunately the young man never knew. The best of men may work his share of heart-break, and the better he is the less he will suspect it. Bayard was far too busy to think of women. For he did not exactly think of Helen Carruth; he felt her. She did not occupy his mind so far that he experienced the need of communication with her; he had never written her so much as a note of ceremony. After her brief scintillation before him on Windover Point that April afternoon, she had melted from his horizon. Nevertheless, she had changed the tint of it. Now and then in the stress of his prosaic, thankless, yet singularly enthusiastic work, there came to the young preacher that sense of something agreeable about to happen, which makes one wake up singing in the morning of one’s hardest day’s labor, or sends one to rest dreaming quietly in the face of the crudest anxiety. The devotee, in the midst of his orisons, was aware of the footstep of possible pleasure falling lightly, distant, doubtful, towards his cell. Some good men pray the louder for this sweet and perilous prescience. Bayard worked the harder.