“Why, I tell you, man,” said Frye, “it’s going to be the greatest success of the year.  I am the only man who has ever put grand-opera effects into comic opera with success.  Just listen to the chords of this opening chorus.”  And so he inspired the singer with some of his own spirit.  They went to work with a will.  Silas might have been reluctant as he felt the strain upon him grow, but that he had spent all his money, and Frye, as he expressed it, was “putting up for him,” until the opening of the season.

Then one day he was taken sick, and although Frye fumed, the rehearsals had to go on without him.  For awhile his companions came to see him, and then they gradually ceased to come.  So he lay for two months.  Even Sadie, his dancing sweetheart, seemed to have forgotten him.  One day he sent for her, but the messenger returned to say she could not come, she was busy.  She had married the man with whom she did a turn at the roof-garden.  The news came, too, that the opera had been abanboned, and that Mr. Frye had taken out a company with a new tenor, whom he pronounced far superior to the former one.

Silas gazed blankly at the wall.  The hollowness of his life all came suddenly before him.  All his false ideals crumbled, and he lay there with nothing to hope for.  Then came back the yearnings for home, for the cabin and the fields, and there was no disgust in his memory of them.

When his strength partly returned, he sold some of the few things that remained to him from his prosperous days, and with the money purchased a ticket for home; then spent, broken, hopeless, all contentment and simplicity gone, he turned his face toward his native fields.

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