When she spoke, as she did when leaving the key with the man in charge of the elevator, her voice sounded remarkably fresh and pleasant.

They left the house together, but while she walked rapidly toward Broadway he contented himself with strolling leisurely along Fourth Avenue, where he bent a vacant gaze on the objects assembled in the windows of dealers in "antiques." But his thoughts did not so much as brush the treasures at which he stared, and neither the hurrying crowd--which had a restless, workaday look at the morning hour--nor the noisily clanging cars broke into the exquisitely reared castle of his dreams.

Since the evening before his imagination had been thrilling to the tune of some spirited music, flowing presumably from these airy towers, and as he went on over the wet sunlight on the sidewalk, he was still keeping step to the exalted if unreal measures.

Never in his life; not even in his wildest literary ecstasies, had he felt so assured of the beauty, of the bountifulness, of his coming years--so filled with a swelling thankfulness for the mere physical fact of birth.

He was twenty-five, he believed passionately in his own powers, and he was, he told himself with emphasis, in love for the first and only time.