He was too young to be engulfed by death.

But he did not think or understand then that the great events which had racked his nerves in suffering were only incidents. Nor did he know that neither his soul nor his heart had suffered all they were capable of enduring. In spite of his deep heart-ache and his feelings that quivered with the memories of his wife, he was above all an artist, a creator. Hope sprang from this last grave. Desire in Fairfax had never been fully born; how then could it be fully satisfied or grow old and cold before it had lived!

Tony Fairfax was the sole mourner that followed Rainsford's coffin to the Potter's Field. They would not bury him in consecrated ground. Canon Prynne had been surprised by a visit at eight o'clock in the morning.

Fairfax was received by the Bishop in his bedroom, where the Bishop was shaving. Fairfax, as he talked, caught sight of his own face in the glass, deathly white, his burning eyes as blue as the heavens to which he was sure Rainsford had gone.

"My friend," the ecclesiastic said, "my friend, I have nothing to do with laws, thank God. I am glad that no responsibility has been given me but to do my work. But let me say, to comfort you, is not every whit of the earth that God made holy? What could make it more sacred than the fact that He created it?"

Fairfax thought of these words as he saw the dust scatter and heard the rattle of the stones on the lid of Rainsford's coffin, and in a clear and assured voice of one who knows in whom he has believed, he read from Bella's Prayer-book (he had never given it back to her), "I am the Resurrection and the Life." He could find no parson to go with him.

On the way back to Albany he met the spring everywhere; it was just before the Easter holidays. Overhead the clouds rolled across a stainless sky, and they took ship-like forms to him and he felt a strong wish to escape—to depart. Rainsford had set him free. It would be months before he could hear from his competition. There was nothing in this continent to keep him. He had come North full of living hope and vital purpose, and meekly, solemnly, his graves had laid themselves out around him, and he alone stood living.

Was there nothing to keep him?

Bella Carew.

He had, of all people in the world, possibly the least right to her. She was his first cousin, nothing but a child; worth, the papers had said, a million in her own right. The heiress of a man who despised him.

But her name was music still; music as yet too delicate, sweet as it was, not to be drowned by the deeper, graver notes that were sounding through Fairfax. There was a call to labour, there was the imperious demand of his art. In him, something sang Glory, and if the other tones meant struggle and battle, nevertheless his desire was all toward them.