THE day before his journey to join the Gussets in London, Gabriel awoke in one of his errant and aspiring moods. Finality had oppressed him of late. The world seemed to have narrowed to the tangible prosaicisms of excess. The cry of his old romanticism awoke within him that morning an Arthurian spirit, the wistful questing after a mysterious unknown. Beauty gleamed anew in the wild twilight of romance. The present cringed in the dust. Noon found him heading for the sea over the wooded hills that rolled north to Rilchester. A brisk breeze tempered the summer heat and reclaimed the hour from languor. Gabriel had certain Roman ruins as his goal—a mouldering wall, some scattered capitols, broken strands of stone, the flower-grown site of an old forum. Ruins accorded with the spirit of romance, though sentiment is not always disinterested in the consideration of things inanimate. Could Troy spare the glamour of a Helen? On the hills above Rilchester dark trees held within their shadows a house that was magical for elemental reasons. Perhaps Gabriel could have gainsaid his soul the relics of an ancient empire. Instincts more ancient perpetuated in him their power. The woods had poured down to possess this city of the dead. Crumbling flints showed amid the claws of some huge oak’s roots. The old walls were bowered in green, mantled in ivy, plumed with gilliflower, snap-dragon, and flowering grass. The forum, an open square closed with grass banks, stood almost free of the trees. Its roadway and the foundation of its shops still showed in the turf. Fragments of pillars and pediments lay sunken in the sward. Flowers bloomed over the dead pavements, a mist of daisies, harebells, and golden ragwort. On the summit of the central mound stood the ruins of an altar, wreathed and overrun by masses of purple nightshade. Southward the sea glimmered. Around rolled the wooden hills, nebulous and haze-wrapped, guardians of mystery. Gabriel climbed the altar mound and sentinelled himself on the mouldering stone. To the romantic mind a tender melancholy wraps the infinite with all the idyllic colors of twilight. To the eye of the poet seas are bluer, skies more splendid, moons more magical, roses more ravishing to the soul. It is only the dullard who beholds in a cloud nothing but visible vapor. Primeval man was more spiritual in many of his notions than the commercial gentleman of to-day. Hope is often father to the fact. Desire and dream of a thing, and in some strange fashion the imagined fruit bends sudden to the hand. Day-dreams are the first dawn-shafts of great minds. Those who live for the present deserve nothing of the future. As for Gabriel, the stars would have fallen in his lap if his dreams had gotten a proportionate reward.