Ah, what happiness was this! What joy, what unutterable rapture! To love thus wholly and without guile and without thought, without even consciousness of loving. What could be more! What could be more than this rich completion of spirit! What were all the gross, material ambitions of the world compared to such love as this! This was not the love of line and colour, the love of form and voice, the love of youth and sprightliness, the love of device or trick. Time would be powerless against this. The line and colour, the form and voice had been to this but the prelude to the imperial theme. These two spirits were now commingling to the perfect tones of the most glorious anthem, chanted by the angels for the accord of man on earth. He saw the crowded theatre, the blaze of light, the circles of wealth, and youth, and beauty, and fashion, of title and distinction, hushed for the great moment. He heard the orchestra pick up a thread of silver melody. He listened as the orchestra seemed, in carelessness, to lose that hint of melody. He heard that hint again, from a single string, and then to a note of sonorous undertone, he saw the great tenor step forth. He heard that voice begin farther away than the most delicate breathing of the instruments below, like a murmur coming from mid-air, under the stars. The sound descended, broadening and mellowing as it came, until it touched the earth in notes of resonant manhood, and then burst forth, complaining loud. Complaining of love denied, of true love lost for ever. He heard the song go on to the melodious climax of its final woe, and then he heard a mighty crash like the sound of an avalanche shot from a giddy, frozen cliff down a precipitous way to the valley below. He looked, he saw men on their feet cheering and clapping their hands, and women waving their handkerchiefs. Women flung their bouquets, their bracelets, their rings upon the stage--these women drunk on a human voice. He heard the "bravos," the "encores," cried by thousands of throats, by those people who were at once the slaves and tyrants of Eugene. Then, again, he heard the orchestra pick up that silver thread of melody---- He threw up his head. Where was this? Had he got so far? and how had he wandered here? Ah! Lincoln's Inn Fields! The College of Surgeons! Surgery, pain, disease, death! What a contrast to that great vision he had just seen! Good God, what a contrast! He turned hastily out of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He could not endure the dingy, decayed look of that rusty old square. He had once been told that the area of this square corresponded with the area of the base of the great Pyramid.