It was a perfect day. The long thoroughfare sloping gently, and narrowing away into distance, with its descending row of irregular, motley buildings of brick and wood, and its lines of passengers, was fresh and salient in the morning sunlight. Blown from the country, wafts of woodland odors, balmy as the breath of Muriel, floated softly to his sense. Flowing out of the west, the morning wind, light as the lips of Muriel, touched his cheeks, and the young man’s heart and blood were full of love and spring. O, blessed magic of one little moment, which had repaired what hours and days undid! Her breath had breathed upon his sense, her lips had met his cheek, and therefore, all thought that she loved another, all evidence that her soul was not in secret, firm alliance with his own, had vanished in the flash of rapture which filled his being. And more—the phantoms which surrounded him had vanished too. Born servant and soldier of mankind, he was often made to feel how powerless he was in the great social war of the many against the one; and at such times, to his spirit, as to that of many a lover of men, came gloomy spectres from the world of complicated wo and wrong. From the grim-grotesque, sad, turbulent scene of the morning street; from the low room of the fugitive’s humbleness and anguish, and the futile generosity of the patrician girl; from the cloud on the horizon of his soul, where glimmered the image of the coming hunter; from the whole dark consciousness of a social order leagued against the poor and weak, the invading phantoms had poured like midnight ghosts around him. But they were all gone, and again there was strength and morning in his soul. The spring day was sweet and beautiful; perfume and victory coursed through his veins; the noble face of his beloved bloomed in his heart; her wild-rose mouth had touched him like the envoy of a costly kiss; her fragrant breath had shot his blood with ecstasy; and past and future melted into the rich passion of the present hour, which had renewed his manhood and left him with the pulse and thews of a Crusader. Flushed and throbbing with the bliss of his thought of Muriel, he reached his dwelling. It was an old, three-storied, quaintly-fashioned brick house, with green blinds, windows and window-panes smaller than those of modern date, and in the centre, up three stone steps, a door with a brass knocker, and a brass plate below it, on which was engraved the name, E. Z. FISHER. The house breathed in an air fragrant with lilacs, whose clumped green and purple bloomed pleasantly over the top of a close board fence, with a gate in it, which extended from the left hand side of the tenement to the blind side-wall of the adjoining dwelling, and inclosed a yard within which abutted from the main building a wing of two stories. In this wing dwelt Harrington; the rest of the house was occupied by the Captain and his family.