furthest valley, and he had felt no stir of wistfulness, he should have interpreted his tranquillity as a willing renunciation of the life he had left,--as if the treadmill limitations and deprivations and mental stagnation of a village were the life he had left. And suddenly--although he had chosen this spot because it shut him in, because naught could be seen to deflect his errant mind, in order that he might realize and earnestly grapple with this wild and troublous lure--the illusions of a sophistry glimmered even in these scant spaces. He was definitely reconciled, he told himself, to his destiny. It was only his imagination that vaguely yearned for the status he had left. With a touch of reality the prismatic charms of this bubble of fancy would collapse,--or the glimpse of conditions native to him, the sound of familiar speech as of his mother tongue, the sight of men and women as compatriots in this long exile as of a foreign land, would prove a refreshment, a tonic, an elixir, renewing his strength to endure. He was a coward to deprive himself--for fear of discontent--of something to enjoy in the present, to remember, and to look forward to, in recurrent years. He had not thought to notice the dwindling shadows that betokened noon and the waiting dinner which Euphemia had made ready with many a remembrance of his preferences. The sun was westering apace when, as if impelled by a force beyond his control, he found himself in the country road, forging ahead with that long swift stride, the envy of his comrades of the pedestrian club of his urban days. His heart seemed to divine the way, for he scarcely paused to debate which fork to pursue when the road diverged; he gave no heed to the laurel jungles on either hand, or, further on, to the shady vistas under the towering trees; he only perceived at last that the density of the woods had diminished. Soon peaked and turreted roofs appeared among the thinning boughs, and as he crossed an elaborately rustic foot-bridge, coquettishly picturesque, flung across a chasm where deep in the brown damp shadows a silver rill trickled, he recognized this as an outpost of artificiality. A burst of music from a band thrilled his unaccustomed ears; a vast panorama of purple and azure mountains, a vermilion sun, a flaring amber sky, great looming gray crags, and the bronze-green sunlit woods beyond were asserted in an unfolding landscape; he heard the laughter cadenced to express the tempered mirth of polite society, and the stir of talk. The verandas of the two-storied hotel were full of well-dressed people. His swiftly glancing eye marked the dowagers; their very costumes were familiar,--black grenadines or silks with a subdued inclination toward a touch of lavender decoration, and some expert softening of the ravages of time by the sparing use of white chiffon or lace, with always something choice in the selection of dainty shawls on the