A talk he had had with the major a day or two ago came back to him.  The old fellow’s eyes had glowed as he told him the plan they had been obliged to abandon in the early seventies for a boulevard from the capitol to the river because of the lack of city construction funds.  Andrew’s own father had formulated the plan and gone before the city fathers with it, and for a time there had been hope of its accomplishment.  And the major had declared emphatically that a time was coming when the city would want and ask for it again.  That other Andrew Sevier of the major’s youth had conceived the scheme; the major had repeated the fact slowly.  Did he mean it as a call to him?

Andrew’s eyes glowed.  He could see it all, with its difficulties and its possibilities.  He rested his clenched hand on the table and the artist in him had the run of his pulses.  He could see it all and he knew in all humbleness that he could construct the town as no other man of his generation would be able to do; the beautiful hill-rimmed city!

And just as potent he felt the call of the half-awakened spirit of art and letters that had lain among them poverty-bound for forty reconstructive years.  For what had he been so richly dowered?  To sing his songs from the camp of a wanderer and write his plays with a foreign flavor, when he might voice his own people in the world of letters, his own with their background of traditions and tragedy and their foreground of rough-hewn possibilities?  Was not the meed of his fame, small or large, theirs?

Suddenly the tension snapped and sadness chilled through his veins.  Here there would always be that memory which brought its influences of bitterness and depression to kill the creative in him.  The old mad desire to be gone and away from it beat up into his blood, then stilled on the instant.  What was it that caught his breath in his breast at the thought of exile?  Could he go now, could—­

Just at this moment he was interrupted by Mrs. Matilda who came hurrying into the room with ribbons and veil aflutter.  She evidently had only the moment to stay and she took in his decorative schemes with the utmost delight.

“Andrew,” she said with enthusiasm in every tone, “it is all lovely, lovely.  You boys are wonders!  These bachelor establishments are threatening to make women wonder what they were born for.  And what do you think?  The major is coming!  The first place he has gone this winter—­and he wants to sit between Phoebe and Caroline Darrah.  I just ran over to tell you.  Good-by!  We must both dress.”

And Andrew smiled as he rearranged the place-cards.

And it happened that in more ways than one David Kildare found himself the perturbed host.  He rushed home and dressed with lightning-like rapidity and whirled away in the limousine for Milly and Billy Bob.  He went for them early, for he had bargained to come for Phoebe as late as possible so as to give her time to reckon with her six-thirty freckled-faced devil at the office.  But at the Overtons he found confusion confounded.