The next evening Alexander dined alone ata club, and at about nine o'clock he dropped inat the Duke of York's. The house was soldout and he stood through the second act.When he returned to his hotel he examinedthe new directory, and found Miss Burgoyne'saddress still given as off Bedford Square,though at a new number. He remembered that,in so far as she had been brought up at all,she had been brought up in Bloomsbury.Her father and mother played in theprovinces most of the year, and she was left agreat deal in the care of an old aunt who wascrippled by rheumatism and who had had toleave the stage altogether. In the days whenAlexander knew her, Hilda always managed to havea lodging of some sort about Bedford Square,because she clung tenaciously to suchscraps and shreds of memories as wereconnected with it. The mummy room of theBritish Museum had been one of the chiefdelights of her childhood. That forbiddingpile was the goal of her truant fancy, and shewas sometimes taken there for a treat, asother children are taken to the theatre. It waslong since Alexander had thought of any ofthese things, but now they came back to himquite fresh, and had a significance they didnot have when they were first told him in hisrestless twenties. So she was still in theold neighborhood, near Bedford Square.The new number probably meant increasedprosperity. He hoped so. He would like to knowthat she was snugly settled. He looked at hiswatch. It was a quarter past ten; she wouldnot be home for a good two hours yet, and hemight as well walk over and have a look atthe place. He remembered the shortest way.

It was a warm, smoky evening, and therewas a grimy moon. He went through CoventGarden to Oxford Street, and as he turnedinto Museum Street he walked more slowly,smiling at his own nervousness as heapproached the sullen gray mass at the end.He had not been inside the Museum, actually,since he and Hilda used to meet there;sometimes to set out for gay adventures atTwickenham or Richmond, sometimes to lingerabout the place for a while and to ponder byLord Elgin's marbles upon the lastingness ofsome things, or, in the mummy room, uponthe awful brevity of others. Since thenBartley had always thought of the BritishMuseum as the ultimate repository of mortality,where all the dead things in the world wereassembled to make one's hour of youth themore precious. One trembled lest before hegot out it might somehow escape him, lest hemight drop the glass from over-eagerness andsee it shivered on the stone floor at his feet.How one hid his youth under his coat andhugged it! And how good it was to turnone's back upon all that vaulted cold, to takeHilda's arm and hurry out of the great doorand down the steps into the sunlight amongthe pigeons--to know that the warm and vitalthing within him was still there and had notbeen snatched away to flush Caesar's leancheek or to feed the veins of some beardedAssyrian king. They in their day had carriedthe flaming liquor, but to-day was his! So thesong used to run in his head those summermornings a dozen years ago. Alexanderwalked by the place very quietly, as ifhe were afraid of waking some one.

He crossed Bedford Square and found thenumber he was looking for. The house,a comfortable, well-kept place enough,was dark except for the four front windowson the second floor, where a low, even light wasburning behind the white muslin sash curtains. Outside there were window boxes, painted whiteand full of flowers. Bartley was makinga third round of the Square when he heard thefar-flung hoof-beats of a hansom-cab horse,driven rapidly. He looked at his watch,and was astonished to find that it wasa few minutes after twelve. He turned andwalked back along the iron railing as thecab came up to Hilda's number and stopped.The hansom must have been one that she employedregularly, for she did not stop to pay the driver.She stepped out quickly and lightly. He heard her cheerful "Good-night, cabby,"as she ran up the steps and opened thedoor with a latchkey. In a few moments thelights flared up brightly behind the whitecurtains, and as he walked away he heard awindow raised. But he had gone too far tolook up without turning round. He went backto his hotel, feeling that he had had a goodevening, and he slept well.

For the next few days Alexander was very busy.He took a desk in the office of a Scotchengineering firm on Henrietta Street,and was at work almost constantly.He avoided the clubs and usually dined aloneat his hotel. One afternoon, after he had tea,he started for a walk down the Embankmenttoward Westminster, intending to end hisstroll at Bedford Square and to ask whetherMiss Burgoyne would let him take her to thetheatre. But he did not go so far. When hereached the Abbey, he turned back andcrossed Westminster Bridge and sat down towatch the trails of smoke behind the Housesof Parliament catch fire with the sunset.The slender towers were washed by a rain ofgolden light and licked by little flickeringflames; Somerset House and the bleachedgray pinnacles about Whitehall were floatedin a luminous haze. The yellow light pouredthrough the trees and the leaves seemed toburn with soft fires. There was a smell ofacacias in the air everywhere, and thelaburnums were dripping gold over the wallsof the gardens. It was a sweet, lonely kindof summer evening. Remembering Hilda as sheused to be, was doubtless more satisfactorythan seeing her as she must be now--and,after all, Alexander asked himself, what wasit but his own young years that he wasremembering?

He crossed back to Westminster, went upto the Temple, and sat down to smoke inthe Middle Temple gardens, listening to thethin voice of the fountain and smelling thespice of the sycamores that came out heavilyin the damp evening air. He thought, as hesat there, about a great many things: abouthis own youth and Hilda's; above all, hethought of how glorious it had been, and howquickly it had passed; and, when it hadpassed, how little worth while anything was.None of the things he had gained in the leastcompensated. In the last six years hisreputation had become, as the saying is, popular.Four years ago he had been called to Japan todeliver, at the Emperor's request, a course oflectures at the Imperial University, and hadinstituted reforms throughout the islands, notonly in the practice of bridge-building but indrainage and road-making. On his return hehad undertaken the bridge at Moorlock, inCanada, the most important piece of bridge-building going on in the world,--a test,indeed, of how far the latest practice in bridgestructure could be carried. It was a spectacularundertaking by reason of its very size, andBartley realized that, whatever else he mightdo, he would probably always be known asthe engineer who designed the great MoorlockBridge, the longest cantilever in existence.Yet it was to him the least satisfactory thinghe had ever done. He was cramped in everyway by a niggardly commission, and wasusing lighter structural material than hethought proper. He had vexations enough,too, with his work at home. He had severalbridges under way in the United States, andthey were always being held up by strikes anddelays resulting from a general industrial unrest.

Though Alexander often told himself hehad never put more into his work than he haddone in the last few years, he had to admitthat he had never got so little out of it.He was paying for success, too, in the demandsmade on his time by boards of civic enterpriseand committees of public welfare. The obligationsimposed by his wife's fortune and positionwere sometimes distracting to a man whofollowed his profession, and he wasexpected to be interested in a great manyworthy endeavors on her account as well ason his own. His existence was becoming anetwork of great and little details. He hadexpected that success would bring himfreedom and power; but it had brought onlypower that was in itself another kind ofrestraint. He had always meant to keep hispersonal liberty at all costs, as old MacKeller,his first chief, had done, and not, like somany American engineers, to become a partof a professional movement, a cautious boardmember, a Nestor de pontibus. He happenedto be engaged in work of public utility, buthe was not willing to become what is called apublic man. He found himself living exactlythe kind of life he had determined to escape.What, he asked himself, did he want withthese genial honors and substantial comforts?Hardships and difficulties he had carriedlightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but thisdead calm of middle life which confronted him,--of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it. It was like being buried alive. In his youthhe would not have believed such a thing possible.The one thing he had really wanted all his lifewas to be free; and there was still somethingunconquered in him, something besides thestrong work-horse that his profession had made of him.He felt rich to-night in the possession of thatunstultified survival; in the light of hisexperience, it was more precious than honorsor achievement. In all those busy, successfulyears there had been nothing so good as thishour of wild light-heartedness. This feelingwas the only happiness that was real to him,and such hours were the only ones in whichhe could feel his own continuous identity--feel the boy he had been in the rough days ofthe old West, feel the youth who had workedhis way across the ocean on a cattle-ship andgone to study in Paris without a dollar in hispocket. The man who sat in his offices inBoston was only a powerful machine. Underthe activities of that machine the person who,in such moments as this, he felt to be himself,was fading and dying. He remembered how,when he was a little boy and his fathercalled him in the morning, he used to leapfrom his bed into the full consciousness ofhimself. That consciousness was Life itself.Whatever took its place, action, reflection,the power of concentrated thought, were onlyfunctions of a mechanism useful to society;things that could be bought in the market.There was only one thing that had anabsolute value for each individual, and it wasjust that original impulse, that internal heat,that feeling of one's self in one's own breast.

When Alexander walked back to his hotel,the red and green lights were blinkingalong the docks on the farther shore,and the soft white stars were shiningin the wide sky above the river.

The next night, and the next, Alexanderrepeated this same foolish performance.It was always Miss Burgoyne whom he startedout to find, and he got no farther than theTemple gardens and the Embankment. It wasa pleasant kind of loneliness. To a man whowas so little given to reflection, whose dreamsalways took the form of definite ideas,reaching into the future, there was a seductiveexcitement in renewing old experiences inimagination. He started out upon these walkshalf guiltily, with a curious longing andexpectancy which were wholly gratified bysolitude. Solitude, but not solitariness;for he walked shoulder to shoulder with ashadowy companion--not little Hilda Burgoyne,by any means, but some one vastly dearer to himthan she had ever been--his own young self,the youth who had waited for him upon thesteps of the British Museum that night, andwho, though he had tried to pass so quietly,had known him and come down and linkedan arm in his.

It was not until long afterward thatAlexander learned that for him this youthwas the most dangerous of companions.

One Sunday evening, at Lady Walford's,Alexander did at last meet Hilda Burgoyne.Mainhall had told him that she would probablybe there. He looked about for her rathernervously, and finally found her at the fartherend of the large drawing-room, the centre ofa circle of men, young and old. She wasapparently telling them a story. They wereall laughing and bending toward her. Whenshe saw Alexander, she rose quickly and putout her hand. The other men drew back alittle to let him approach.

"Mr. Alexander! I am delighted. Have you beenin London long?"

Bartley bowed, somewhat laboriously,over her hand. "Long enough to have seenyou more than once. How fine it all is!"

She laughed as if she were pleased. "I'm gladyou think so. I like it. Won't you join us here?"

"Miss Burgoyne was just telling us abouta donkey-boy she had in Galway last summer,"Sir Harry Towne explained as the circleclosed up again. Lord Westmere strokedhis long white mustache with his bloodlesshand and looked at Alexander blankly.Hilda was a good story-teller. She wassitting on the edge of her chair, as if shehad alighted there for a moment only.Her primrose satin gown seemed like a soft sheathfor her slender, supple figure, and its delicatecolor suited her white Irish skin and brownhair. Whatever she wore, people felt thecharm of her active, girlish body with itsslender hips and quick, eager shoulders.Alexander heard little of the story, but hewatched Hilda intently. She must certainly,he reflected, be thirty, and he was honestlydelighted to see that the years had treated herso indulgently. If her face had changed at all,it was in a slight hardening of the mouth--still eager enough to be very disconcertingat times, he felt--and in an added air of self-possession and self-reliance. She carried herhead, too, a little more resolutely.

When the story was finished, Miss Burgoyneturned pointedly to Alexander, and theother men drifted away.

"I thought I saw you in MacConnell's boxwith Mainhall one evening, but I supposedyou had left town before this."

She looked at him frankly and cordially,as if he were indeed merely an old friendwhom she was glad to meet again.

"No, I've been mooning about here."

Hilda laughed gayly. "Mooning! I seeyou mooning! You must be the busiest manin the world. Time and success have donewell by you, you know. You're handsomerthan ever and you've gained a grand manner."

Alexander blushed and bowed. "Time andsuccess have been good friends to both of us. Aren't you tremendously pleased with yourself?"

She laughed again and shrugged her shoulders."Oh, so-so. But I want to hear about you.Several years ago I read such a lot in thepapers about the wonderful things you didin Japan, and how the Emperor decorated you.What was it, Commander of the Order ofthe Rising Sun? That sounds like `TheMikado.' And what about your new bridge--in Canada, isn't it, and it's to be the longestone in the world and has some queer name Ican't remember."

Bartley shook his head and smiled drolly."Since when have you been interested inbridges? Or have you learned to be interestedin everything? And is that a part of success?"

"Why, how absurd! As if I were notalways interested!" Hilda exclaimed.

"Well, I think we won't talk about bridges here,at any rate." Bartley looked down at the toeof her yellow slipper which was tapping the rugimpatiently under the hem of her gown."But I wonder whether you'd think me impertinentif I asked you to let me come to see you sometimeand tell you about them?"

"Why should I? Ever so many peoplecome on Sunday afternoons."

"I know. Mainhall offered to take me.But you must know that I've been in Londonseveral times within the last few years, andyou might very well think that just now is arather inopportune time--"

She cut him short. "Nonsense. One of thepleasantest things about success is that itmakes people want to look one up, if that'swhat you mean. I'm like every one else--more agreeable to meet when things are goingwell with me. Don't you suppose it gives meany pleasure to do something that people like?"

"Does it? Oh, how fine it all is, yourcoming on like this! But I didn't want you tothink it was because of that I wanted to see you."He spoke very seriously and looked down at the floor.

Hilda studied him in wide-eyed astonishmentfor a moment, and then broke into a low,amused laugh. "My dear Mr. Alexander,you have strange delicacies. If you please,that is exactly why you wish to see me.We understand that, do we not?"

Bartley looked ruffled and turned the sealring on his little finger about awkwardly.

Hilda leaned back in her chair, watchinghim indulgently out of her shrewd eyes."Come, don't be angry, but don't try to posefor me, or to be anything but what you are.If you care to come, it's yourself I'll be gladto see, and you thinking well of yourself.Don't try to wear a cloak of humility; itdoesn't become you. Stalk in as you are anddon't make excuses. I'm not accustomed toinquiring into the motives of my guests. Thatwould hardly be safe, even for Lady Walford,in a great house like this."

"Sunday afternoon, then," said Alexander,as she rose to join her hostess."How early may I come?"

She gave him her hand and flushed andlaughed. He bent over it a little stiffly.She went away on Lady Walford's arm, and as hestood watching her yellow train glide downthe long floor he looked rather sullen. He feltthat he had not come out of it very brilliantly.