And Bernard Battle.  That was an honest hate, and he hugged it to him.  Before him still, so vivid that it seemed but yesterday, hovered the memory of that wild evening in the road, and the unforgotten sunset faced him as he hurried through the wood.  In the acuteness of his remembered senses he could hear the dead leaves rustle in his pathway and could smell the vague scents of autumn drifting on the wind.  Through all the years of public life and passionate endeavour he had not lost one colour of the painted clouds or missed one note from the sharp tangle of autumn odours.  To this day the going down of the sun in red and gold awoke within him the impulse of revenge, and the effluvium of rotting flowers or the tang of pines revived the duller ache of his senseless rage.

On that evening he had buried his youth with his youthful passion.  The hours between the twilight and the dawn had seen his emotions consumed and his softer side laid waste.  Since then he had not played saint or martyr; he had gone his way among women, and he had liked some good ones and some bad ones—­but the turn of Eugenia’s head or the trick of her voice had haunted him in one and all.  He had followed the resemblance and had found the vacancy; he had been from first to last a man of one ideal.  His nature had broadened, hardened, rung metallic to the senses; but it had not yielded to the shock of fresh emotions.  He had loved one woman from her childhood up.

And again she rose before him as in that Indian summer when he knew her best—­her beauty flaming against the autumn landscape, “clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.”  He saw her red or pale, quivering or cold, always passing from him in a splendour of colours that was like the clash of music.

That was sixteen years ago and it seemed but yesterday.  He had lost her, and yet he had not been unhappy, for he had learned that it is not gain that makes happiness nor loss that kills it.  Life had long since taught him the lesson all great men learn—­that happiness is but one result of the adjustment of the individual needs to the Eternal Laws.  A man had once said of him, “Burr must think a lot of life; he bears it so blamed well.  He’s the happiest man I know,” and Burr, overhearing him, had laughed aloud: 

“Am I?  I have never thought about it.”

He did not think about life, he lived it; this was the beginning and the end of his success.

The face of Eugenia faded slowly into the firelight, and he rose and shook himself like a man who awakes from a nightmare.  There was work for him at his desk, and he settled to it with sudden determination.

A week later the papers were still in his desk.  He told himself at first that he would send them to Kingsborough to Judge Bassett and abide by his decision; but the course struck him as cowardly and he put it from him.  The work was his and he would do it.  Then for a week longer he went on his way and did not think of them.  His days were filled with work and it was easy to leave disturbing thoughts alone; what was not easy was to consider them judicially.