Anthony burned under a whelming sense of injustice. He decided that he would leave the room, his father, forever; but, somehow, he remained motionless in his chair, casting about in his thoughts for words with which to combat the elder's scorn. He thought of Eliza; she smiled at him with appealing loveliness; he felt her letter in his pocket, remembered her boundless generosity. He couldn't leave her! The band in the square below was playing a familiar operatic lament, and the refrain beat on his consciousness in waves of despairing and poignant longing. A sea of misery swept over him in which he struggled like a spent swimmer--Eliza was the far, silver shore toward which he fought. It wasn't fair--a sob almost mastered him--to ask him to go away now, when he had but found her. “It's not Siberia,” he heard his father say, “nor a life sentence; if this--this 'girl' is serious, you will be closer working for her in California than idle in Ellerton.” “I don't want to go away from her,” he whispered; “the world's such a hell of a big, empty place... things happen.” He dashed some bright tears from his eyes, and, turning his back on the other, gazed through the window at the tops of the maple trees--a black tracery of foliage against the lights below. “Two or three years should set you on your feet, give you an opportunity to return.” Eternity could scarcely have seemed more appalling than the term casually indicated by his father, it was unthinkable! A club member entered, fingering the racked journals on the long table, exchanging trivial comments with the older Ball. It seemed incredible to Anthony, in the face of the cataclysm which threatened him, that the world should continue to revolve callously about such topics. It was an affront to the gravity, the dignity, of his suffering. He swiftly left the room. XIX IT was Saturday night, Bay Street was thronged, the stores brilliantly lit. He saw in the distance the red and blue jars of illuminated water that advertised Doctor Allhop's drugstore, and turned abruptly on his heel. In the seclusion of his room he once more read Eliza's letter: it was a superlative document of sweet commonsense, the soul of nobility, of wisdom, of tenderness, of divine generosity. In its light all other suggestions, considerations, courses, seemed tawdry and ignoble. The boasted wisdom of a world of old men, of material experience, seemed only the mean makeshifts for base and unworthy ends. The ecstasy sweeping from his heart to his brain, the delicious fancies, the rare harmonies, that haunted him, the ineffable perfume of invisible lilacs--these were the true material from which to fashion life, these were the high things, the important. And youth was the time to grasp them: a swift premonition seized him of the coldness, the ineptitude, the disease, of old age.