Meanwhile Gabriel had wandered to the garden, where the hand of evening was crushing the red juices of the sunset, staining the cloudy steps of heaven. The lawns were of green silk, the flowers thereon like color fallen from the pallet of day. The cypresses stood clothed with azure, the pines like Ethiop maidens wrapped in gossamer work of gold. In the thickets two thrushes were singing, flinging lyric rivalry over the dusky leaves. The man plunged to the more lonely depths, a broad hollow where flowers and shrubs were tangled in a mist of green. He walked, inhaling the perfumed breath of the hour, with head thrown back, as one who watches the heavens. All the damsels of the night seemed to steal out of their chambers, dewy-lipped, ebon-tressed, with eyes liquid as moon-kissed water. Love! What was it? A vapor and a shade? An intangible essence dying on the lips when tasted, with an infinite regret! He passed again from the swarthy shrubberies, and saw the windows of his own home yellow and tiger-eyed towards the night. Roses beckoned in the gloom. What were they to him? With the grass like velvet moss under his feet, he drew near to a window and listened. Music came from within, and laughter, facile and light. They were merry, these two, merry at his heart’s cost, and perhaps Gabriel guessed it. Their words were like falling water to him, confused and meaningless. Despite the pleading voice of his woman of dreams, he grew full of bitterness and keen irony of soul. It had grown dark when he went in to them. A constrained quiet seemed to pervade the room even from the moment that his hand had touched the door. Books were forthcoming, cushions, and an occasional trite monosyllable that broke the silence. More than once a yawn arose behind the ivory screen of five white fingers. The man’s presence seemed to agree ill with the atmosphere. It was not long before the two oppressed ones arose and trailed languidly to bed. Gabriel sat on over a paper-backed novel that he had found lying in a chair. _A Close Climax_ was its title, and from some casual introspection of its pages he surmised that it was gotten from the French, and not the more ideal for that same reason. He noted remarks concerning ladies’ underclothing, a perfervid scene in a fashionable Spanish beauty’s boudoir, sundry hints as to happiness, physical of course, and a frequent appeal to a sentiment named Love. The book did not hold much converse with him that evening. It abode on his knee more as a cynical fragment of realism. An instinctive and nameless fear of the future was the wraith that stood at his side that night.