He did not stop at Ona’s room; and struck with alarm, Paula opened wide her door and was about to step out to meet him, when she caught a sight of his face, and started back. Here was no anxiety, that she could palliate! The very fact that he did not observe her slight form standing before him in the brilliant moonlight, proved that a woman’s look or touch was not what he was in search of; and shrinking sensitively to one side, she sat down on the edge of her dainty bed, dropping her cheek into her hand with a weary troubled gesture from which all the delight had fled and only the apprehension remained. Suddenly she started alertly up; he was coming down again, this time with a gliding muffled tread. Sliding past her door, he descended to the floor below. She could hear the one weak stair in the heavy staircase creak, and—What! he has passed Ona’s room, passed the bronze figure of Luxury on the platform beneath, is on his way to the front door, has opened it, shut it softly behind him and gone out again into the blank midnight streets. What did it mean? For a moment she thought she would run down and awaken Ona, but an involuntary remembrance of how those lazy eyes would open, stare peevishly and then shut again, stopped her on the threshold of her door; and sitting down again upon the side of her bed, she waited, this time with opened eyes eagerly staring before her, and quivering form that started at each and every sound that disturbed the silence of the great echoing house. At six o’clock she again rose; he had just re-entered and this time he stopped at Ona’s room. XIX. A DAY AT THE BANK. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.” —HAMLET. There are days when the whole world seems to smile upon one without stint or reservation. Bertram Sylvester wending his way to the bank on the morning following the reception, was a cheerful sight to behold. Youth, health, hope spake in every lineament of his face and brightened every glance of his wide-awake eye. His new life was pleasant to him. Bach, Beethoven and Chopin were scarcely regretted now by the ambitious assistant cashier of the Madison Bank, with a friend in each of its directors and a something more than that in the popular president himself. Besides he had developed a talent for the business and was in the confidence of the cashier, a somewhat sickly man who more than once had found himself compelled to rely upon the rapidly maturing judgment of his young associate, in matters oftentimes of the utmost importance. The manner in which Bertram found himself able to respond to these various calls, convinced him that he had been correct in his opinion of his own nature, when he informed his uncle that music was his pleasure rather than his necessity.