To this Strong answered pleasantly enough, but as though his mind were quite made up:  “I don’t mean to interfere if I can help it, but I can’t persecute Esther, if it is going to make her unhappy.  As it is, I am likely to catch a scoring from my aunt for bringing you down on them, and undoing her work.  I wish I were clear of the whole matter and Esther were a pillar of the church.”

With this declaration of contingent neutrality, Strong went his way, and as he walked musingly back to his rooms, he muttered to himself that he had done quite as much for Hazard as the case would warrant:  “What a trump the girl is, and what a good fight she is making!  I believe I am getting to be in love with her myself, and if he gives it up—­hum—­yes, if he gives it up,—­then of course Esther will go abroad and forget it.”

Hazard’s solitary thoughts were not quite so pointless.  The danger of disappointment and defeat roused in him the instinct of martyrdom.  He was sure that all mankind would suffer if he failed to get the particular wife he wanted.  “It is not a selfish struggle,” he thought.  “It is a human soul I am trying to save, and I will do it in the teeth of all the powers of darkness.  If I can but set right this systematically misguided conscience, the task is done.  It is the affair of a moment when once the light comes;—­A flash!  A miracle!  If I cannot wield this fire from Heaven, I am unfit to touch it.  Let it burn me up!”

Early the next morning, not a little to their own surprise, Strong and Wharton found themselves dashing over the Erie Road towards Buffalo.  They had a long day before them and luckily Wharton was in his best spirits.  As for Strong he was always in good spirits.  Within the memory of man, well or ill, on sea or shore, in peril or safety, Strong had never been seen unhappy or depressed.  He had the faculty of interesting himself without an effort in the doings of his neighbors, and Wharton always had on hand some scheme which was to make an epoch in the history of art.  Just now it was a question of a new academy of music which was to be the completest product of architecture, and to combine all the senses in delight.  The Grand Opera at Paris was to be tame beside it.  Here he was to be tied down by no such restraints as the church imposed on him; he was to have beauty for its own sake and to create the thought of a coming world.  His decorations should make a revolution in the universe.  Strong entered enthusiastically into his plans, but both agreed that preliminary studies were necessary both for architects and artists.  The old world must be ransacked to the depths of Japan and Persia.  Before their dinner-hour was reached, they had laid out a scheme of travel and study which would fill a life-time, while the Home of Music in New York was still untouched.  After dinner and a cigar, they fought a prodigious battle over the influence of the Aryan races on the philosophy of art, and then, dusk coming on, they went to sleep, and finished an agreeable journey at about midnight.