But this little Yankee girl had of a sudden realized his ideal. Something in their first meeting, momentary though it was, and strange according to conventional notions, struck the chord in his heart that was waiting silent for the magic fingers that knew the secret of waking it. If he had fancied that those fingers would never come, or coming, never find it, that something in his unhappy birth set him apart with that strange pain of yearning as his portion in life, and so had tried to forget or choke the want under commonplace attachments and ties, he was no worse than, nor different from, the rest of humanity. But all humanity does not meet trial as unflinchingly and honorably--does not put temptation out of its way as purely and honestly as did this undisciplined life. It is hard to take at once the path that duty orders: we linger to play with possibilities, shed some idle tears, waste life before the necessity, and go back to everyday work weakened and scarred and aching. And once or twice in a lifetime that black, hopeless _never_ drops down, not the less grievous and inexorable because simply a moral obligation. Well, only babies cry for the moon. Anything clearly impossible and out of our reach we very soon cease sighing for. Men do not cherish a passion which they recognize as utterly hopeless; and Clement Moore, being a man, and moreover an honorable one, put this summer idyl out of his head and heart with all despatch. 'All blundering is sin.' If he had blundered in allowing it to take such hold of his life, he expiated the sin bravely. Sympathies bud and blossom with miraculous quickness in this tropical atmosphere of affinity. He did not know till the excitement of actual presence was over, and he had time to think soberly, in the dead blank and quiet that followed, how it had grown to be a part of his very existence. But whether that part was to be just a pleasant remembrance through the dusty and hot years before him, or whether it was to go deeper and wring his heart with bitterest sense of loss, he did not quite realize. At any rate there was a risk in dwelling on it. He had no more right to be running that risk than he had to be trifling with a cup of deadliest poison; and so he shut away all the golden-winged fancies that had sprung into life with those long, fervid days. Shut them away and sealed their prison place. If they were dead, or pleading for freedom in his still moments, he never asked nor thought. He came back from his lounging summer trip with a certain new, strange drive of purpose in him never seen before. The many events that had crowded themselves into the next year did not smother his prisoners. He never saw their corpses or thought of them sneeringly, and by that sign knew they existed still. But dust and all the desolation of desertion gathered about the hidden chamber that he never recurred to now. Still he kept away from its neighborhood; at first setting a guard of persistent physical action.