“Poor little chap,” said Katharine, in her husky voice.  “How fond people have always been of Adriance!  Tell me the latest news of him.  I haven’t heard, except through the press, for a year or more.  He was in Algiers then, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback, and he had quite made up his mind to adopt the Mahometan faith and become an Arab.  How many countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder?”

“Oh, that’s Adriance,” chuckled Everett.  “He is himself barely long enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes.  I didn’t hear from him while he was an Arab; I missed that.”

“He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it must be in the publisher’s hands by this time.  I have been too ill to answer his letter, and have lost touch with him.”

Everett drew an envelope from his pocket.  “This came a month ago.  Read it at your leisure.”

“Thanks.  I shall keep it as a hostage.  Now I want you to play for me.  Whatever you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy let me hear it.”

He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his remarkable physical likeness to his brother, and trying to discover in just what it consisted.  He was of a larger build than Adriance, and much heavier.  His face was of the same oval mould, but it was grey, and darkened about the mouth by continual shaving.  His eyes were of the same inconstant April colour, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance’s were always points of high light, and always meaning another thing than the thing they meant yesterday.  It was hard to see why this earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face, as gay as his was grave.  For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words.  A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and of her affections, once said that the shepherd-boys who sang in the Vale of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde.

Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that night, the victim of mournful recollections.  His infatuation for Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyish love-affairs.  The fact that it was all so done and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and loss.

He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his brother’s studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he had wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York.  He had sat there in the box—­while his brother and Katherine were called back again and again, and the flowers went up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano—­brooding in his sullen boy’s heart upon the pride those two felt in each other’s work—­spurring each other to their best and beautifully contending in song.  The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering line drawn sharply between their life and his.  He walked back to his hotel alone, and sat in his window staring out on Madison Square until long after midnight, resolved to beat no more at doors that he could never enter.