No inducements of this sort, alone, could ever have drawn him from his love.  However, his love was safe, in any case.  If they made him editor, they would give him an assistant.  He would keep his mornings for himself—­four hours a day.  In the long vigil last night, he had threshed the whole thing out.  On a four-hour schedule he could finish his book in four years and a half more:—­an unprecedentedly early age to have completed so monumental a work.  And who could say that in thus making haste slowly, he would not have acquired a breadth of outlook, and closer knowledge of the practical conditions of life, which would be advantageously reflected in the Magnum Opus itself?

The young man sat at his table, the sheaf of yellow sheets which made up the chapter he was now working on ready under his hand.  Around him were his reference books, his note-books, his pencils and erasers, all the neat paraphernalia of his trade.  Everything was in order; yet he touched none of them.  Presently his eyes fell upon his open watch, and his mind went off into new channels, or rather into old channels which he thought he had abandoned for this half-hour at any rate.  In five minutes more, he put away his manuscript, picked up his watch, and strolled back into the sitting-room.

Nicolovius was sitting where he had left him, except that now he was not reading but merely staring out of the window.  He glanced around with a look of pleased surprise and welcome.

“Ah-h!  Did genius fail to burn?” he asked, employing a bromidic phrase which Queed particularly detested.

“That is one way of putting it, I suppose.”

“Or did you take pity on my solitariness?  You must not let me become a drag upon you.”

Queed, dropping into a chair, rather out of humor, made no reply.  Nicolovius continued to look out of the window.

“I see in the Post,” he presently began again, “that Colonel Cowles, after getting quite well, broke himself down again in preparing for the so-called Reunion.  It seems rather hard to have to give one’s life for such a rabble of beggars.”

“That is how you regard the veterans, is it?”

“Have you ever seen the outfit?”

“Never.”

“I have lived here long enough to learn something of them.  Look at them for yourself next week.  Mix with them.  Talk with them.  You will find them worth a study—­and worth nothing else under the sun.”

“I have been looking forward to doing something of that sort,” said Queed, introspectively.

Had not Miss Weyland, the last time he had seen her—­namely, one evening about two months before,—­expressly invited him to come and witness the Reunion parade from her piazza?

“You will see,” said Nicolovius, in his purring voice, “a lot of shabby old men, outside and in, who never did an honest day’s work in their lives.”

He paused, finished his cigarette and suavely resumed: