All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance. His education in France had been an accident. His married life had been happy largely through a circumstance with which neither he nor his wife had anything to do. They had been young people with good qualities, and very much in love, but they could not have been happy if Lillian had not inherited a small income from her father — only about sixteen hundred a year, but it had made all the difference in the world. A few memorable interregnums between servants had let him know that Lillian couldn’t pinch and be shabby and do housework, as the wives of some of his colleagues did. Under such conditions she became another person, and a bitter one.

Tom Outland had been a stroke of chance he couldn’t possibly have imagined; his strange coming, his strange story, his devotion, his early death and posthumous fame — it was all fantastic. Fantastic, too, that this tramp boy should amass a fortune for someone whose name he had never heard, for “an extravagant and wheeling stranger.” The Professor often thought of that curiously bitter burst from the barytone in Brahms’ Requiem, attending the words, “He heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall scatter them!” The vehemence of this passage had seemed to him uncalled for until he read it by the light of the history of his own family.

St. Peter thought he had fared well with fate. He wouldn’t choose to live his life over — he might not have such good luck again. He had had two romances: one of the heart, which had filled his life for many years, and a second of the mind — of the imagination. Just when the morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came Outland and brought him a kind of second youth.

Through Outland’s studies, long after they had ceased to be pupil and master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull with use. The boy’s mind had the superabundance of heat which is always present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light.

If the last four volumes of “The Spanish Adventurers” were more simple and inevitable than those that went before, it was largely because of Outland. When St. Peter first began his work, he realized that his great drawback was the lack of early association, the fact that he had not spent his youth in the great dazzling South-west country which was the scene of his explorers’ adventures. By the time he had got as far as the third volume, into his house walked a boy who had grown up there, a boy with imagination, with the training and insight resulting from a very curious experience; who had in his pocket the secrets which old trails and stones and water-courses tell only to adolescence.

Two years after Tom’s graduation they took the copy ............