In the warm, subdued light of a double lamp with apricot glass shades Howat Penny was turning over the pages, stiff with dry paste, of an album filled with opera programmes. The date of the brief, precisely penned label on the black cover was 1883-84; it was the first of a number of such thick, recording volumes he had gathered; and the operas, the casts, were of absorbing interest. At once a memento of the heroic period of American music and of his first manhood, the faded crudely embellished strips of paper, bearing names, lyric tenors and sopranos of limpid, bird-like song long ago lost in rosy and nebulous clouds of fable and cherished affection, roused remembered pleasures sharper than any calm actuality of to-day. He paused with a quiet exclamation, the single glass adroitly held in his left, astigmatic, eye fastened on the announcement of a famous evening, a famous name. His sense of the leaf before him blurred in the vivid memory of Patti, singing Martha in the campaign brought by Mapleson in the old Academy of Music against the forces of the new Metropolitan Opera House. He had been one of a conservative number that had supported the established opera, declaring heatedly that the Diva and Mapleson were an unapproachable musical combination, before which the shoddier magnificence of its rival, erected practically in a few summer months, would speedily fade. Nevertheless, he recalled, the widely heralded performance had been coolly received. Patti, although she had not perceptibly failed in voice, had been unable to inspire the customary enthusiasm; and the scene at the evening's end, planned to express her overwhelming triumph and superiority, when the horses had been taken from her carriage and it had been dragged by hand to the portal of the Windsor Hotel, had been no better than perfunctory. The wily Mapleson had arranged that beforehand, Howat Penny realized, with a faint, reminiscent smile on his severe lips--the "enthusiastic mob" had been coldly recruited, at a price, from the choristers. Another memory of Patti, and of that same performance, flooded back--the dinner given her in the Brunswick. He saw again the room where, on a divan, she had received her hosts, the seventy or more men of fashion grouped in irreproachable black and white, with her suave manager, the inevitable tea rose in his lapel, on a knee before Adelina, kissing her hand. The dinner had been laid in the ball room, lit with a multitude of wax candles. The features, appearance, of the more prominent men, of Mahun Stetson and Daly and William Steinway, were clear still. The original plan had been to include ladies at the dinner, but the latter, affecting outrage at the Diva's affair with the Marquis de Caux, had refused to lend their countenance to the singer's occasion. His smile broadened--this was so characteristic of New York in the eighties. How different it had been; but it was no better, he added silently, now. It was mid-August, and the air floating in through an open door was ladened with the richness of ultra-luxuriant vegetation, the persistent, metallic whirring of locusts, the mechanical repetition of katydids. One of the owls that inhabited the old willow tree before the house cried softly.... How different! He straightened up from the book open on his knees, and the glass fell with a small clatter over his formal, starched linen, swinging for an instant on its narrow ribbon. The unwavering lamp light was deflected in green points through the emeralds of his studs. The thought of bygone, gala nights of opera fastened on him with a peculiar significance--suddenly they seemed symbolic of his lost youth. Such tides of impassioned song, such poignant, lyric passion, such tragic sacrifice and death, were all in the extravagant key of youth. The very convention of opera, the glorified unreality of its language, the romantic impossibility of its colour, the sparkling dress like the sparkling voices and blue gardens and gilded halls, were the authentic expression of the resplendent vagaries of early years. The winter of eighty three and four; his first season of New York music. The autumn before he had returned from the five years spent in Europe, in Paris practically, with Bundy Provost, related to him by a marriage in the past generation, through the Jannans. He had gone abroad immediately after his graduation as a lawyer; and in the indolent culture of the five Parisian years, he now realized, he had permanently lost all hold on his profession. At his return he had drifted imperceptibly into an existence of polite pleasure. It had been different with Bundy; he had gone into the banking house of Provost, lately established in New York; and, with the extraordinary pertinacity and acumen sometimes developed by worldly and rich young men, he had steadily risen to a place of financial importance. An opening had, of course, been offered to Howat Penny when he had definitely decided not to settle in Philadelphia, where the Pennys had always been associated, and pursue the law. And, at first, he had occupied a desk in the Provost counting rooms. But he had soon grown discontented, he disliked routine and a clerk's condition; and, after two years of annoyed effort, withdrew to lead a more congenial existence on a secure, adequate income. "It was a mistake," he said aloud, in a decided, clearly modulated voice, gazing blankly into the warm stillness of the room. It had come partly from his innate impatience with any inferior state whatever, and part from the old inability to identify himself with the practicalities of existence. He had always viewed with distaste the apparently necessary compromises of successful living; the struggle for money, commercial supremacy, seemed unendurably ugly; the jargon and subterfuges of financial competition beneath his exacting standard of personal dignity. That had been his expression at the time--permeated by an impatient sense of superiority; but now he felt that there was something essential lacking in himself. An absence of proper balance. Solely concerned with the appearance, the insignificant surface, of such efforts as Bundy Provost's, their moving, masculine spirit had evaded him. Yes, it had been a mistake. He had missed the greatest pleasure of all, that of accumulating power and influence, of virile achievement. Well, it was over now; he was old; his life, his chance, had gone; and all that remained were memories of Patti smiling disdainfully in the flare of oil torches about her carriage; the only concrete record of so many years the scrap books such as that on his knees. It had been an error; yet there had been, within him, no choice, no intimation of a different, more desirable, consummation. Bundy had gone one way and himself another in obedience to forces beyond their understanding or control. They had done, briefly, what they were. There was no individual blame to attach, no applause; spare moralizing to append. He returned to the pages before him, to the memories of the radiant Ambre and Marimon, the sylvan echoes of Campanini singing Elvino. Now his recovered glass was intent on a programme of the rapidly successful Metropolitan forces, of the new German Opera, with Seidl-Krauss singing Elizabeth, and Brandt in Fidelio. Even here, after so long, he vibrated again to the exquisite beauty of Lenore's constancy and love. Then Dr. Damrosch dead, the sonorous funeral in the Opera House ... That had been changed with the rest; the baignoires were gone, the tiers of boxes newly curved; gone the chandeliers and Turkey red carpet and gold threaded brocade that had seemed the final expression of luxury. Lehmann in the premier of Tristan und Isolde, with the vast restrained enthusiasm and tensity when, at the end of the third act, Niemann bared his wounded breast. Eames' rise; but that, and what followed, were in successive books. He closed the one under his hand. As the years drew nearer the present their features became larger, more indistinct, their music grew louder, dissonant. He had retired further and further from an opera, a life, with which he was increasingly out of harmony. Or rather, he added, life moved away from the aging. It was as if the surrounding affair became objective; as if, once a participant in a cast--a production, however, less than grand--he had been conducted to a seat somewhere in the midst of a great, shadowy audience, from which he looked out of the gloom at the brilliant, removed spectacle. The final fact that had taken him from the setting of so many of his years had been the increasing expense of a discriminating existence in New York. Again his distaste for anything short of absolute nicety had dictated the form and conditions of his living. When the situation of his rooms had definitely declined, and the cost of possible locations--he could not endure a club--became prohibitive; when his once adequate, unaugmented income assumed the limitations of a mere sufficiency; and when, too, the old, familiar figures, the swells of his own period and acquaintance had vanished one by one with their vanishing halls of assembly--he had retreated to the traditional place of his family. He had gone back to the home of the Pennys in America. Not, however, to Myrtle Forge itself, the true centre of his inheritance. The house there had been uninhabited since his father's early years; it was a closed and melancholy memento; he had reanimated a comfortable stone dwelling at Shadrach Furnace; its solid grey facade drawn out by two happy additions to the original, small square. It had been, traditionally, at first, the house of the head furnacemen; sometime after that, perhaps a hundred years, Graham Jannan, newly married, had lived there while occupied with the active manufacture of iron; and three summers back he, Howat Penny, the last Penny now, had returned to the vicinity of Jaffa.