lled himself a fool; more than once he shook
out the thin sheets of his morning paper and buried himself in their
contents, but unavailingly. The feeling of flatness, the sense of
dissatisfaction with the world as it stood, grew instead of diminishing.
At last, throwing down the paper, he gave up the unequal struggle and
yielded to the pessimistic pleasure of self-analysis. He recalled last
night and its vexatious trend of events, and with something akin to
shame, he remembered his anger against Max; but although he admitted its
possible exaggeration, the admission brought no palliation of Max's
offence. He, possibly, had behaved like a brute; but Max had behaved
like an imbecile!

At this point, he fell to staring fixedly in front of him, and through
the meshes of his day-dream floated a face--not the face of the boy he
was condemning, but that of the mysterious cause of last night's
calamity.

He conjured it with quite astonishing vividness--the face of the
portrait--the face so like, so unlike, the boy's. Every detail of the
picture assailed him; the subtle illusion of the mirror--the strange,
reflected eyes propounding their riddle.

Looking in imagination into those eyes, he lost himself delightfully.
Sensations, periods of time passed and repassed in his
brain--speculation, desire, and memory danced an enchanting, tangled
measure.

He recalled the hundred fancies that had held, or failed to hold him in
his thirty-eight years; he recalled the women who had loved too little,
the women who had loved too much; and, quick upon the recollection, came
the consciousness of the disillusion that had inevitably followed upon
adventure.

He did not ask himself why these dreams should stir, why these ghosts
should materialize and kiss light hands to him in the blue brilliance of
this May morning; he realized nothing but that behind them all--a
reality in a world of shadows--he saw the eyes of the picture
insistently propounding their riddle--the riddle, the question that from
youth upward had rankled, inarticulate, in his own soul.

It arose now, renewed, with his acknowledgment of it--the troubling,
insistent question that cries in every human brain, sometimes softly,
like a child sobbing outside a closed door, sometimes loudly and
terribly, like a man in agony. The eternal question ringing through the
ages.

He recognized it, clear as the spoken word, in this unknown woman's
gaze; and for the first time in all his