What an ass he had been, he bitterly reflected, as he passed again through the Luxembourg Gardens, where now the statues glistened in the fading light of the dying afternoon. What a mad ass! If a single stroke of almost pathetically small good luck made such a fool of him, it was as well that his uncle and not his father had come into a fortune. His thought went back with a new tenderness to his father and to his own and his sister Cora's early life in that small Ohio town. He had hated the dull routine and narrow conventionality of the place. There the most daring romance of youth had been to walk with the daughter of a neighbor along the shaded streets in the Summer evenings, and to hang over the gate to the front yard of the house in which she lived, tremblingly hinting at a delicious tenderness, which one never dared more adequately to express, until a threatening parental voice called the girl to shelter. His life, since those days, had been more stirring, and sometimes more to be regretted; but he had loved it and thought it absurd sentiment on Cora's part to insist that their tiny income go to keeping up the little property--the three-story brick house and wide front and back-yard along Main Street--which had been their home. Yet now he felt, and was half ashamed of feeling, a strong desire to go back there, a pull at his heartstrings for a return to all that he was once so anxious to quit forever. He wondered if it could be possible that he was tired of Paris. He even wondered if it were possible that he could not be a successful artist--he had never wanted to be a rich one--whether the sensible course would not be to go home and study law while there was yet time.... And then---- Then, in the rose-pink twilight, the beginning of the Dream Wonderful: that scent of the roses from the sky; that quick memory of sunlight upon snow-crests; that first revelation of the celestial Lady transfiguring the earthly commonplace of his room! CHAPTER IV A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS ... Adowne They prayd him sit, and gave him for to feed. --Spenser: _Faerie Queene_. Charlie Cartaret would have told you--indeed, he frequently did tell his friends--that the mere fact of a man being an artist was no proof that he lacked in the uncommon sense commonly known as common. Cartaret was quite insistent upon this and, as evidence in favor of his contention, he was accustomed to point to C. Cartaret, Esq. He, said Cartaret, was at once an artist and a practical man: it was wholly impossible, for instance, to imagine him capable of any silly romance.