Indoors some one struck a peal of silver chords, like a harp touched by a lover, and a woman's voice was lifted.

John Harkless leaned on the pasture bars and listened with upraised head and parted lips.
"To thy chamber window roving, love hath led my feet." The Lord sent manna to the children of Israel in the wilderness.
Harkless had been five years in Plattville, and a woman's voice singing Schubert's serenade came to him at last as he stood by the pasture bars of Jones's field and listened and rested his dazzled eyes on the big, white face of the moon.
How long had it been since he had heard a song, or any discourse of music other than that furnished by the Plattville Band--not that he had not taste for a brass band! But music that he loved always gave him an ache of delight and the twinge of reminiscences of old, gay days gone forever.

To-night his memory leaped to the last day of a June gone seven years; to a morning when the little estuary waves twinkled in the bright sun about the boat in which he sat, the trim launch that brought a cheery party ashore from their schooner to the Casino landing at Winter Harbor, far up on the Maine coast.
It was the happiest of those last irresponsible days before he struck into his work in the world and became a failure.

To-night he saw the picture as plainly as if it were yesterday; no reminiscence had risen so keenly before his eyes for years: pretty Mrs.Van Skuyt sitting beside him--pretty Mrs.Van Skuyt and her roses! What had become of her?
He saw the crowd of friends waiting on the pier for their arrival, and the dozen or so emblazoned classmates (it was in the time of brilliant flannels) who suddenly sent up a volley of college cheers in his honor--how plainly the dear, old, young faces rose up before him to-night, the men from whose lives he had slipped! Dearest and jolliest of the faces was that of Tom Meredith, clubmate, classmate, his closest friend, the thin, red-headed third baseman; he could see Tom's mouth opened at least a yard, it seemed, such was his frantic vociferousness.
Again and again the cheers rang out, "Harkless! Harkless!" on the end of them.

In those days everybody (particularly his classmates) thought he would be minister to England in a few years, and the orchestra on the Casino porch was playing "The Conquering Hero," in his honor, and at the behest of Tom Meredith, he knew.
There were other pretty ladies besides Mrs.Van Skuyt in the launch-load from the yacht, but, as they touched the pier, pretty girls, or pretty women, or jovial gentlemen, all were overlooked in the wild scramble the college men made for their hero.