The young Mason Grew had not at first accepted this astral episode as the complete cancelling of his claims on romance.  He too had grasped at the high-hung glory; and, with his fatal tendency to reach too far when he reached at all, had singled out the prettiest girl in Wingfield.  When he recalled his stammered confession of love his face still tingled under her cool bright stare.  The wonder of his audacity had struck her dumb; and when she recovered her voice it was to fling a taunt at him.

“Don’t be too discouraged, you know—­have you ever thought of trying Addie Wicks?”

All Wingfield would have understood the gibe:  Addie Wicks was the dullest girl in town.  And a year later he had married Addie Wicks...

He looked up from the perusal of Ronald’s telegram with this memory in his mind.  Now at last his dream was coming true!  His boy would taste of the joys that had mocked his thwarted youth and his dull gray middle-age.  And it was fitting that they should be realized in Ronald’s destiny.  Ronald was made to take happiness boldly by the hand and lead it home like a bridegroom.  He had the carriage, the confidence, the high faith in his fortune, that compel the wilful stars.  And, thanks to the Buckle, he would have the exceptional setting, the background of material elegance, that became his conquering person.  Since Mr. Grew had retired from business his investments had prospered, and he had been saving up his income for just such a contingency.  His own wants were few:  he had transferred the Wingfield furniture to Brooklyn, and his sitting-room was a replica of that in which the long years of his married life had been spent.  Even the florid carpet on which Ronald’s tottering footsteps had been taken was carefully matched when it became too threadbare.  And on the marble centre-table, with its chenille-fringed cover and bunch of dyed pampas grass, lay the illustrated Longfellow and the copy of Ingersoll’s lectures which represented literature to Mr. Grew when he had led home his bride.  In the light of Ronald’s romance, Mr. Grew found himself re-living, with a strange tremor of mingled pain and tenderness, all the poor prosaic incidents of his own personal history.  Curiously enough, with this new splendor on them they began to emit a small faint ray of their own.  His wife’s armchair, in its usual place by the fire, recalled her placid unperceiving presence, seated opposite to him during the long drowsy years; and he felt her kindness, her equanimity, where formerly he had only ached at her obtuseness.  And from the chair he glanced up at the large discolored photograph on the wall above, with a brittle brown wreath suspended on a corner of the frame.  The photograph represented a young man with a poetic necktie and untrammelled hair, leaning negligently against a Gothic chair-back, a roll of music in his hand; and beneath was scrawled a bar of Chopin, with the words:  “_ Adieu, Adele_.”