era disjecta_--and turned their pages.

"Yes--yes--give us life!" they seemed to cry to him. "We are dead drops
of ink, wake us to life and beauty. How much longer are we to lie here,
dusty in death? We have waited so patiently--have pity on us, raise us
up from our silent tomb, and we will fly abroad through the whole earth,
chanting your glory; yea, the world shall be filled to eternity with the
echoes of our music and the splendour of your name."

But he shook his head and sighed, and put them back in their niches, and
placed the comic opera he had begun in the centre of the table.

"There lie the only dollars that will ever come my way," he said aloud.
And, humming the opening bars of a lively polka from the manuscript, he
took up his pen and added a few notes. Then he paused; the polka would
not come--the other voice was louder.

"It would be a degradation," he repeated, to silence it. "It would be
merely for her money. I don't love her."

"Are you so sure of that?"

"If I really loved her I shouldn't refuse to marry her."

"Are you so sure of that?"

"What's the use of all this wire-drawing?--the whole thing is impossible."

"Why is it impossible?"

He shrugged his shoulders impatiently, refusing to be drawn back into the
eddy, and completed the bar of the polka.

Then he threw down his pen, rose and paced the room in desperation.

"Was ever any man in such a dilemma?" he cried aloud.

"Did ever any man get such a chance?" retorted his silent tormentor.

"Yes, but I mustn't seize the chance--it would be mean."

"It would be meaner not to. You're not thinking of that poor girl--only
of yourself. To leave her now would be more cowardly than to have left
her when she was merely Mary Ann. She needs you even more now that she
will be surrounded by sharks and adventurers. Poor, poor Mary Ann. It
is you who have the right to protect her now; you were kind to her when
the world forgot her. You owe it to yourself to continue to be good to
her."

"No, no, I won't humbug myself. If I married her it would only be for
her money."

"No, no, don't humbug yourself. You like her. You care for her very
much. You are thrilling at this very moment with the remembrance of her
lips to-night. Think of what life will be with her--life full of all
that is sweet and fair--love and riches, and leisure for the highest art,
and fame and the promise of immortality. You are irritable, sensitive,
delicately