She slipped back into her silent waiting, and the quest of his ancestors became to Neil slightly absurd.

* * * * *

In so vast a universe as Grand Republic, with nearly a hundred thousand people, there are many worlds unknown to one another. One of the worlds least known to Neil was the feverish one of music: violin teachers giving lessons in the “front parlors” of red-brick houses in rows; little girls learning the saxophone; the Symphony Association which, once a year, managed to bring the Duluth Orchestra to town.

This year, with the local Finnish Choral Society, the orchestra appeared at the Wargate Memorial Auditorium, in late January. Along with such ordinary citizens as Neil and Vestal, the fabulously great appeared at the concert: Webb and Louise Wargate, Dr. Henry Sparrock, Madge Dedrick with her daughter, Eve Champeris, Oliver and Morton Beehouse, Greg and Diantha Marl, Judge and Mrs. Cass Timberlane—she a frail, excited sparkle. Even Boone and Queenie Havock were there, both slightly drunk, as that was the only state in which they could endure the enjoyment of music.

(There were also present, but unmarked by the Frontier society reporter, a number of people who liked music.)

It amused Neil to think of how they would all turn from the mild magnificence of Hannikainen on the podium to him, if they knew that he was a Royal Personage…. He might wear his crown and ermine down to work on the Sylvan Park bus, and set up court at his desk at the Second National.

He forgot these splendors as the orchestra and the chorus marched into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He was borne into a place he had never seen. It was a spacious prospect across ornamental waters and oak-shadowed lawns to the pillars of a great house whose windows were wreathed with stone flowers. Behind it was a hill of heather, and over all a tower, broken and ancient. And it seemed to him that this was all his own.

“Is this some ancestral memory?” he wondered. “Did some great-great-something, that is me now, own that once? Is it maybe true that I could be a king?

“Or duke?

“Oh, settle for a baron!”

Chapter 10

He was developing a new idea in banking, and it had been gratifyingly approved by Mr. Prutt and Cashier S. Ashiel Denver.

He was establishing a Veterans’ Advisory Center where, as they were discharged from the Army or Navy, Neil’s former companions in arms could come for information about finding jobs and renting houses, about Government compensation and educational grants—and it would be all right if they started new accounts in the Second National, or took out wholesome mortgages.

Neil was to be in charge, with a salary increase to three hundred and fifty a month, and if the Center grew enough, he was to have an assistant. Now, in that Northern April that was not spring but a dilution of winter, he was certain that the war in Germany would be over in a few months, and he hastened to get ready the Center’s corner, which resembled a handsome mahogany horse-stall, with Neil’s desk and two velvet chairs and a considerably less velvety bench, all fit for heroes.