“I hate to say that he is—­charming,” Cope complained.

He was a good sport, and he wanted Becky to be happy.  But it was not easy to sit there and see those two—­with the pendulum swinging between them of joy and dreams, and the knowledge of a long life together.

“Why should it be?” he asked Louise, as he stood beside her, later, on their own little porch which overlooked the sea; “those two—­did you see them?  While I——­”

Louise laid her hand on his shoulder.  “Yes.  I think it is something like this, Arch.  They’ve got to live it out, and life isn’t always going to be just to-night for them.  And perhaps in the years together they may lose some of their dreams.  They’ve got to grow old, and you, you’ll go out—­with all—­your dreams——­”

He reached up and took the kind hand.

“‘They all go out like this—­into the night—­but what a fleet of—­stars.’  Is that it, Louise?”

“Yes.”

The clearness of the moonlight was broken by long fingers of fog stretched up from the horizon.

“I’ll wrap up and sit here, Louise,” Archibald said; “I shan’t sleep if I go in.”

“Don’t stay too long.  Good-night, my dear, good-night.”

Archibald, watching the fog shut out the moonlight, had still upon him that sense of revolt.  Fame had never come to him, and love had come too late.  Yet for Randy there was to be fulfillment—­the wife of his heart, the applause of the world.  What did it all mean?  Why should one man have all, and the other—­nothing?

Yet he had had his dreams.  And the dreams of men lived.  That which died was the least of them.  The great old gods of democracy—­Washington, Jefferson, Adams—­had seen visions, and the visions had endured.  Only yesterday Roosevelt had proclaimed his gallant doctrines.  He had died proclaiming them, and the world held its head higher, because of his belief in its essential rightness.

The mists enveloped Archibald in a sort of woolly dampness.  He saw for a moment a dim and distant moon.  If he could have painted a moon like that—­with fingers of fog reaching up to it——!

His own dreams of beauty?  What of them?  His pictures would not live.  He knew that now.  But he had given more than pictures to the world.  He had given himself in a crusade which had been born of high idealism and a sense of brotherhood.  Day after day, night after night, his plane had hung, poised like an eagle, above the enemy.  He had been one of the young gods who had set their strength and courage against the greed and grossness of gray-coated hordes.

And these dreams must live—­the dreams of the young gods—­as the dreams of the old gods had endured.  Because men had died to make others free, freedom must be the song on the lips of all men.

He thought of Randy’s story.  The Trumpeter Swan was only a stuffed bird in a glass case.  But once he had spread his wings—­flown high in the upper air.  There had been strength in his pinions—­joy in his heart—­thrilling life in every feather of him.  Some lovely lines drifted through Archibald’s consciousness—­