“How silent and thoughtful we are to-night!” he cried at last, after having received more than one random answer from the master of Greenlands. “One would think you had seen a ghost, Harold; your eyes are fixed, like the eyes of Brutus at Philippi, or of Agamemnon when the warning shade of Achilles appeared to him, before the sailing of the ship that was to take him home--to death. What is the phantom at which you gaze with eyes of gloom?” “The ghost of the Past,” answered Mr. Jerningham, as he rose to join his friend. “Not to Lot’s wife alone is it fatal to look back. I have been looking back to-day, Theodore.” Within, all was silent except the piano, softly touched by slow, gentle hands, that stole along the keys in a languid, legato movement. The player wondered at the change which had come upon her companion and fellow-student, and wondered to find the change in him so keen a sorrow to herself. Very gloomy were the thoughts of Eustace as he sat in his dark corner, with closed eyes, and hands clasped above his head. “How dare I tell him who and what I am, and then ask for the hand of his only daughter? Can I hope that even his simplicity will pardon such a family history as that which I must tell?” All through the dark hours of that midsummer night he lay awake, brooding over the pages he had read, and thinking of the stain upon his name. To an older man, steeped in the hard wisdom of the world, the stigma would have been a lesser agony. He would have counted over to himself the list of great names made by the men who bore them, and would have found for himself crumbs of comfort. But for Eustace there was none. He had set up his divinity, and it seemed to him that only the richest tribute could be offered upon a shrine so pure. His thoughts deepened in gloom as the night waned, until the fever in his mind assumed the force of inspiration. Rash and impetuous as youth and poetry, he resolved that for him hope there was none, except far a-field of this Arcadian dwelling. “Shall I offer myself, nameless, in order to be refused?” he asked. “No. I will leave this too dear home, and go out into the world to make myself a name among modern poets before I ask confession or promise of Helen de Bergerac.” To make himself a name among modern poets! The dream was a bold one. But the dreamer told himself that the ladder of Fame is sometimes mounted with a rush, and that for the successful writer of magazine lyrics it needs but a year or so of isolation and concentrated labour, a year or so of fervent devotion in the temple of Apollo, a year or so of poetic quietism, to accomplish the one great work which shall transform the graceful singer of modern Horatian odes into the world-renowned poet.