solemn promise that the purpose and passion of his mother’s years of sacrifice should, in him and in his work, be fulfilled.  One by one, he retraced the steps that had led to his understanding that only a true and noble art could ever make good that promise.  Not by winning the poor notice of the little passing day, alone; not by gaining the applause of the thoughtless crowd; not by winning the rewards bestowed by the self-appointed judges and patrons of the arts; but by a true, honest, and fearless giving of himself in his work, regardless alike of praise or blame—­by saying the thing that was given him to say, because it was given him to say—­would he keep that which his mother had committed to him.  As mile after mile of the distance that lay between him and the girl he loved was put behind him in his race to her side, it was given him to understand—­as never before—­how, first the friendship of the world-wearied man who had, himself, profaned his art; and then, the comradeship of that one whose life was so unspotted by the world; had helped him to a true and vital conception of his ministry of color and line and brush and canvas.

It was twilight when the artist reached the spot where the road crosses the tumbling stream—­the spot where he and Conrad Lagrange had slept at the foot of the mountains.  Where the road curves toward the creek, the man, without checking his pace, turned his head to look back upon the valley that, far below, was fast being lost in the gathering dusk.  In its weird and gloomy mystery,—­with its hidden life revealed only by the sparkling, twinkling lights of the towns and cities,—­it was suggestive, now, to his artist mind, of the life that had so nearly caught him in its glittering sensual snare.  A moment later, he lifted his eyes to the mountain peaks ahead that, still in the light of the western sun, glowed as though brushed with living fire.  Against the sky, he could distinguish that peak in the Galena range, with the clump of pines, where he had sat with Sibyl Andres that day when she had tried to make him see the train that had brought him to Fairlands.

He wondered now, as he rode, why he had not realized his love for the girl, before they left the hills.  It seemed to him, now, that his love was born that evening when he had first heard her violin, as he was fishing; when he had watched her from the cedar thicket, as she made her music of the mountains and as she danced in the grassy yard.  Why, he asked himself, had he not been conscious of his love in those days when she came to him in the spring glade, and in the days that followed?  Why had he not known, when he painted her portrait in the rose garden?  Why had the awakening not come until that night when he saw her in the company of revelers at the big house on Fairlands Heights—­the night that Mr. Taine died?