xperience to justify it,--that
melancholy we are too apt to look back upon with cynical jeers and
laughter in middle age,--is more potent than we dare to think, and
it was in no mere pose of youthful pessimism that Randolph Trent now
contemplated suicide. Such scraps of philosophy as his education had
given him pointed to that one conclusion. And it was the only refuge
that pride--real or false--offered him from the one supreme terror of
youth--shame.

The street was deserted, and the few lights he had previously noted in
warehouses and shops were extinguished. It had grown darker with the
storm; the incongruous buildings on either side had become misshapen
shadows; the long perspective of the wharf was a strange gloom from
which the spars of a ship stood out like the cross he remembered as a
boy to have once seen in a picture of the tempest-smitten Calvary. It
was his only fancy connected with the future--it might have been his
last, for suddenly one of the planks of the rotten wharf gave way
beneath his feet, and he felt himself violently precipitated toward
the gurgling and oozing tide below. He threw out his arms desperately,
caught at a strong girder, drew himself up with the energy of
desperation, and staggered to his feet again, safe--and sane. For with
this terrible automatic struggle to avoid that death he was courting
came a flash of reason. If he had resolutely thrown himself from the
pier head as he intended, would he have undergone a hopeless revulsion
like this? Was he sure that this might not be, after all, the terrible
penalty of self-destruction--this inevitable fierce protest of mind and
body when TOO LATE? He was momentarily touched with a sense of gratitude
at his escape, but his reason told him it was not from his ACCIDENT, but
from his intention.

He was trying carefully to retrace his steps, but as he did so he saw
the figure of a man dimly lurching toward him out of the darkness of the
wharf and the crossed yards of the ship. A gleam of hope came over him,
for the emotion of the last few minutes had rudely displaced his pride
and self-love. He would appeal to this stranger, whoever he was; there
was more chance that in this rude locality he would be a belated sailor
or some humbler wayfarer, and the darkness and solitude made him feel
less ashamed. By the last flickering street lamp he could see that he
was a man about his own size, with something of the rolling gait of a
sailor, which was incr