Mr. Delafield, stepping comfortably forth from his club, had dined especially well, and was in a correspondingly good humour. As the brisk March wind swept across the corner just in front of him, he meanwhile settling his glossy hat more firmly on a fine, close-clipped grey head, a sudden kindly impulse, not entirely usual with him, sent him bending to his knee to pick up the fugitive slip of white, scribbled foolscap that fluttered by him, hotly pursued by a slender young man.  
"Thanks. Oh, thanks!" murmured the pursuer, as Delafield, with a courteous inclination of the head, tendered the captured slip.
 
"Not at all." A consciousness of the boy's quick panting, his anxious tug at the paper, actually an almost audible beating of the heart, drew the older man to look carefully at him. A white, oval face, drooping mouth, black, deep-set eyes that fairly burned into his, compelled attention.
 
[70]
 
"Important paper, I suppose?" he inquired lightly. "Wouldn't want to lose it."
 
"No—oh, no!"
 
"Get a wigging at the office?"
 
"It—it's not—they are my own—it is a poem!" stammered the young man.
 
Delafield chuckled involuntarily, and then, as a quick red poured over the other's cheeks, he made a hasty gesture of apology.
 
"No offence—none at all, I assure you, Mr.—Mr. Poet! I was only taken by surprise. One doesn't often assist a poet in catching his works!" He laughed again, a contented after-dinner laugh.
 
Then, as the young man fell behind him quietly, the incident being over, an idle desire for company prompted him to delay his own pace.
 
"Do you write much? Get it printed? Good publisher?" he inquired genially. Few persons could resist Lester Delafield's smile: his very butler warmed to it, and the woman who retained her reserve under it he had never met.
 
Again the young man blushed. "Published? No,[71] sir; I never dared to see—I don't know if it's worth being printed," he said.
 
"But you think it's pretty good, eh? I'll bet you do. I used to. Let me see it. I'll tell you if it's worth anything."
 
They had turned into a quieter cross-street; the wind had passed them by. Standing under a street-light, benevolently amused at his impulse, Delafield tucked his stick under his arm, uncreased the paper, and noted the title of the poem aloud: To the Moon in a Stormy Night. His eyebrows lifted; he glanced quizzically at the young man, but met such an earnest, searching look, so restrained, yet so quivering, so terrified, yet so brave, that his heart softened and he read on in silence.
 
A minute passed, two, three, and four. The man read silently, the boy waited breathless in suspense. The noisy, crowding city seemed to sweep by them, leaving them stranded on this little point of time.
 
Mr. Delafield raised his eyes and regarded the boy thoughtfully.
 
"You say you wrote this?" he demanded.
 
"Yes, sir."
 
[72]
 
"When did you write it?"
 
"Last night."
 
"Have you any more like it?"
 
"I don't know if it's like it. I've got quite a good deal more. What do you——" He could get no further. Drops of perspiration started from his forehead. His mouth was drawn flat with anxiety.
 
"This poetry," said Delafield, with a carefully impersonal calm, "is very good. It is remarkably good. It is stunning, in fact. 'And moored at last in some pale bay of dawn'—why did you stop there? Isn't that rather abrupt?"
 
"That was when it ended. Do you really think——"
 
"I don't think anything about it. I know. You have a future before you, my young friend. I should like to see—Good Lord, what is it?"
 
For the boy had twined his arms around the lamp-post and was slowly sinking to the pavement. His face was ghastly white. Delafield grasped his arm, and as their eyes met, the older man drew a quick breath and scowled.
 
[73]
 
"It's not because—you're not—when did you have your lunch?" he demanded shortly.
 
The boy smiled weakly.
 
"And your breakfast?"
 
"Oh, I had that—quite a little—really I did!" he half whispered.
 
Delafield got him on his feet and around the corner to a restaurant. As they entered, the smell of the food weakened him again, and he staggered against his friend, begging his pardon helplessly.
 
"Soup—and hurry it up, it's immaterial what kind," the host commanded.
 
As the boy gulped it down he made out a further order, and while the hot meat, vegetables, and bread vanished and the strong, brown coffee lowered in the cup, he lighted a long cigar and talked with a quiet insistence. Later, when his guest blinked drowsily behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, he asked questions, marvelling at the simple replies.
 
The boy's name was Henry West; it was twenty-two years since he had made his appearance in a family already large enough to regard his advent[74] with a stoical endurance. His people all worked in the mills in Lowell; he, too, till the noise and jar gave him racking headaches. He made his first verses in the mill. He had come to New York to learn to be a clerk in a corner drug-store kept by a distant cousin, but he couldn't seem to learn the business. The names of the things were hard to remember. His cousin said he was absent-minded.
 
And he had to read everything that was in sight: if a thing was printed he seemed to have to read it. He read books from the library and the night-school when his cousin thought he was polishing the soda-fountain. Of all the things he hated—and they were many—the soda-fountain was the worst. He wanted to study a great deal, but only the studies he liked. Not algebra and geometry, nor chemistry that made his head ache, but history and poetry and French. He thought he would like to know Italian, too. The family supposed he was still in the drug-store, but he had quarrelled with his cousin and left it a month ago. He stayed mostly in the library and helped the janitor with sweeping and airing the rooms. The[75] janitor paid him a little to ease his own hours of night-watching, and often asked him to supper. He read nearly all day and wrote at night. It was better than the mills or the drug-store. He supposed he was lazy—his family always said he was.
 
"Come to this address to-morrow afternoon and bring the rest of your poetry with you," said Delafield, "I have an engagement at nine. May I keep this one till you come?"—he shook the foolscap significantly. The boy hesitated, almost imperceptibly, then nodded. As Delafield left the little table he did not rise with him, but sat with his eyes fixed on the smoke-rings.
 
"They do not teach courtesy in the night-schools, evidently," mused the older man, peering for a cab; "but one can't have everything. My manners have been on occasion commended—but I can't write poetry like that."
 
He tasted in advance the pleasure of reading the poem to Anne: how her brown eyes would dilate and glow, how eagerly her long, slender fingers would clasp and unclasp. People called her[76] cold, they told him; for his part he never could see why. True, she was not kittenish, like the other nieces; she didn't try to flirt with her old uncle, as Ellen's girls did; but what an enthusiasm for fine things, what a quick, keen mind the child had! Child—Anne was twenty-five by now. Was it true that she might never marry? Ellen said—but then Ellen was always a little jealous of poor Anne's money. The girl couldn't help her legacies. Still, at twenty-five—perhaps it was true that she expected too much, thought too seriously, reasoned morbidly that they were after her money.
 
Seated opposite her in his favourite oak chair, looking with a sudden impersonal appraisal at the slender figure in clinging black lace, the cool pallor of the face under the smooth dark hair, the rope of pearls that hung from her firm, girlish shoulders, it dawned on him that there was something wanting in this not quite sufficiently charming piece of womanhood. She was too black-and-white, too unswerving, too unflushed by life. Humanity, with its countless moulding and colouring touches, seemed to slip away from either side[77] of her, like the waves from some proud young prow, and fall behind.
 
"Yet she's not unsympathetic—I swear she's not!" he thought, as her eyes glowed to the poem and her lips parted delightedly.
 
"'And moored at last in some pale bay'—Uncle Les, isn't that beautiful! Not that it's really so fine as the first part, but it's easier to remember. And he was hungry? Oh, oh! And you discovered him, didn't you?"
 
He nodded complacently.
 
"I'll bring you around the rest of the things to-morrow. I knew you'd enjoy this, Anne. You love—really love—this sort of thing, don't you?"
 
She nodded eagerly.
 
"But nothing else? Nobody—you don't think that perhaps you're letting—after all, my dear, life is something more than the beautiful things you surround yourself with—pictures and music and poetry, and all that. It really is. There is so much——"
 
"There is one's religion," she said quietly and not uncordially. But she had retreated intangibly[78] from him. She sat there, remote as her cold pearls, as far from the rough, sweet uses of the world as the priceless china in her cabinets.
 
"Oh, yes, of course, there is religion," he answered listlessly.
 
Two days later they sat, all three, in her library, while West read them his poems. The two looked at each other in amazement. Where had this untrained factory boy got it all? What wonderful voices had sung to him above the whirring of the wheels; what delicate visions had risen through the smoky pall of his sordid days? He wrote only of Nature: the brown brook water in spring; the pale, hurrying leaves of November; a bird glimpsed through pink apple-blossoms; the full river encircling a bending elm. In the vivid swiftness of effect, the simple subtlety of treatment, there was a recalling of the Japanese witchery of suggestion; the faint tinge of sadness in every poem left in the mind precisely the sweet regret that the beauty of the world must always leave. At the "Clearing Shower," perhaps the most compelling of all his work, quick drops started to the[79] girl's eyes, so intense was the vision of the moist, green-breathing earth, the torn fleece of the clouds, the broken chirping of frightened birds, the softened, yellow light that reassures and saddens at once. His art was not Wordsworth's nor Shelley's; it was as if Keats had turned from human passion and consecrated the beauty of his verse to the beauty of Nature—but simply, sadly, and through a veil of Heine's tears.
 
Delafield nodded mutely to his niece, then walked over to the boy.
 
"There will be plenty of people to tell you later," he said, holding out his hand, "but let me be the first. You are a genius, Mr. West, and your country will be proud of your work some day. There is no American to-day writing such poetry."
 
West took his hand awkwardly, not rising from his chair. He fingered his manuscript nervously.
 
"I—I wouldn't want to be laughed at," he demurred. "Other folks mightn't be so kind as you. If anybody laughed—I—it would just about kill me!" he concluded, passionately. They smiled sympathetically at each other.
 
[80]
 
"But no one would laugh, I assure you, Mr. West," Anne murmured, stooping to pick up a scattered sheet.
 
He hardly noticed her. His eyes were fixed constantly on Delafield: the girl had made no impression upon him whatever. Nor did the elegance of the furnishings, the evidences of great wealth everywhere arouse in him the least apparent curiosity. Having no knowledge of the many grades of material prosperity between his own meagre surroundings and Anne Delafield's luxury, he accepted the one as he had endured the other, his mind quite removed from either, his eyes looking beyond.
 
Anne had supposed that her uncle would carry the poems to one of the leading magazines, but he pooh-poohed the idea.
 
"I think not. We're not going to have the boy mixed up with the hacks that turn out two or three inches of rhymes to fill up a page in a magazine," he declared. "We'll have D—— drop in some night and West shall read 'em to him. Then we'll bring out a book. Here and in England—they'll[81] like him there, or I'm much mistaken."
 
In a month it seemed that they had always known him. Intimacy was so impossible with his inturned, elusive nature, that to have him sitting through hours of silence by the birch fire, abstracted, dreamy, inattentive, except to some chance word that stirred his fancy, was to know him well, to all intents. His nerves, dulled to all great torments like poverty, hunger, obscurity, quivered like violin strings under little unaccustomed jarrings. If interrupted in the reading of his verses he would lose his control beyond belief; a chance cough, the falling of an ember, put him out of tune for hours. He possessed little sense of humour, and the lightest satire turned him sulky. A child might have teased him to madness; it was evident to them that his utterly lonely life had preserved him from constant torture at the hands of associates.
 
Until the book was complete he refused to have the great publisher brought to hear it read. Sometimes for days they would not see him, then on[82] some rainy evening he would appear, lonely and hungry, eager for the praise and warmth of Anne's library, an exquisite poem in his pocket. Served to repletion by the secretly scornful butler, he would smoke a while, then draw out the sheet of foolscap, and read in his nervous yet musical voice the latest page of the book that was to bring him fame.
 
On one such night—it was when he brought them "Dawn on the River," the only poem of which Anne had a copy, and the one which a well-known firm afterward printed under his photograph and sold by thousands at Easter-tide—he broke through the mist—it was too impalpable to be called a wall of reserve—that held his personality apart from them, and talked wonderfully for an hour. They seemed to see the clear soul of some gentle, strayed fawn; his thoughts were like summer clouds mirrored in a placid brook. All the crowding, sweating humanity of his stunted boyhood had flowed through his youth like an ugly drain laid through a fresh mountain stream. He seemed to have lived all his years with young[83] David on the hillside, and wealth and poverty, crowds and loneliness, love and death were as far from his life as if the vast procession of them all that swept by him daily through the great city had never been.
 
As he talked, Delafield found his eyes drawn from the boy's face to Anne's. Never before had he seen just that faint, steady rose in her cheeks, that sweet glow in her eyes. As she leaned forward, her very pearls seemed to catch a red tinge from the fire: it occurred to him for the first time that she looked like Ellen's girls—there was a suggestion of Kitty in the curve of her cheek.
 
Was it possible that Anne—no, it could not be. To think of the men that had tried to come into her life and failed—such men! And this boy, this elf, to whom no woman was so real or so dear as a tree in the glen!
 
For two weeks after that night he did not come. Anne never mentioned his name, and Delafield, doubtful of what that might portend, tried to believe that she had forgotten him. Toward the end of the second week she spoke of the completion of[84] his book, and suggested that her uncle should invite Mr. D——: "Urge Henry to consent to it," she added, "he will do anything for you, Uncle Les."
 
"More than for you?" he asked.
 
"For me?" She flushed a little. "I doubt if he distinguishes me from my portrait over the mantel!"
 
"And you wish that he would," Delafield wanted to reply, trying to remember if she had ever called him "Henry" before.
 
On a warm April evening, when the windows were open to catch the setting sun and the odour of the blossoming window-boxes, he came at last. As he stepped into the room, head erect, eyes wide and bright, they became aware immediately of a change in him. His glance was more conscious, more alert, his hand-gras............