* * * * *

The Duke de Metuan had come and gone back—­with his answer, and Paul, too, had left Haverly Lodge.  For Paul’s return there were two reasons.  The music-room which Hamilton had built as a gift to his brother was nearing completion, and the finishing touches demanded personal supervision.  As the heart of a high priest turns to his temple, so turned Paul Burton’s heart to this spot at this time.  It was a temple, but decidedly a pagan temple.  Porphyry columns went up from a mosaic floor to a richly encrusted ceiling, and in conception and detail it was lavishly beautiful and perfect.  Hamilton had conceived and planned the structure with a very ferocity of tense interest:  though to Hamilton a music-room was in itself about as absorbing as a steam laundry.

In the undertaking he saw a monument to a dream and the fulfilment of a promise that one ragged boy had made to another ragged boy standing by a panel of broken fence.  Hamilton had never forgotten that moment when first his pent-up ambitions had broken into fiery utterance while his little brother listened with eyes wide and wondering—­yet full of faith.  Then he had promised Paul an organ in a cathedral of dreams, where the imaginary self which was his greater self might find expression.

This was to be the worthy realization of that boast.

The second reason for the younger Burton’s withdrawal from the house party was the departure of Loraine Haswell.

Now, finding himself in town, he had accepted one of those invitations which meant the acknowledgment of his lionizing in Fashion’s world of music.  Paul had little in common with those struggling men whose passion for violin or piano leads them through poverty and hunger in pursuit of their bays.  But to face and stir with his art’s hypnosis an audience of the smartest men and women in town, was meat and drink to his soul—­was his soul’s vanity.  Of all his vanities it was the least weak—­because the most sincere.

To see faces awaken from ennui and kindle into attentiveness, then soulfulness as he swayed them with the touch of his fingers on the keys was no mean triumph.  To draw men out of lolling ease into tense and unconsidered attitudes; to cause women’s lips to part and their pupils to grow misty as he carried them with him,

    “Through the meadows of the sunset, through the poppies and the wheat,
    To the land where the dead dreams go”

—­these were his delights.  There are meaner pleasures.

But when he had played a little while, the composite pattern of faces always faded and darkened into a blur and he forgot them:  forgot himself, forgot everything except the instrument that had become the mouthpiece of his soul.  Then he, like his audience, was swept away into an impalpable world where nothing remained save the marvelous cascading and crushing tides which were the tides of golden sound.  At such moments Paul Burton was almost a master.