g a bargain. "How can I appeal to these motes?" he asked himself.
"By what magic can I lift myself out of this press to earn a living--out
of this common drudgery?" He studied the faces in the coffee-house where
he sat. "How many of these citizens are capable of understanding for a
moment _Enid's Choice_? Is there any subject holding an interest common
to them and to me which would not in a sense be degrading in me to
dramatize for their pleasure?"

This was the question, and though his breakfast and a walk on the avenue
cleared his brain, it did not solve his problem. "They don't want my
ideas on architecture. My dramatic criticism interests but a few. My
plays are a proved failure. What is to be done?"

Mingled with these gloomy thoughts, constantly recurring like the dull,
far-off boom of a sombre bell, was the consciousness of his loss of
Helen. He did not think of returning to ask forgiveness. "I do not
deserve it," he repeated each time his heart prompted a message to her.
"She is well rid of me. I have been a source of loss, of trouble, and
vexation to her. She will be glad of my self-revelation." Nevertheless,
when he found her letter waiting for him in his box at the office he was
smitten with sudden weakness. "What would she say? She has every reason
to hate me, to cast me and my play to the winds. Has she done so? I
cannot blame her."

Safe in his room, he opened the letter, the most fateful that had ever
come to him in all his life. The very lines showed the agitation of the
writer:

"MY DEAR AUTHOR,--Pardon me for my harshness last night, and come
to see me at once. I was nervous and anxious, as you were. I should
have made allowances for the strain you were under. Please forgive
me. Come and lunch, as usual, and talk of the play. I believe in
it, in spite of all. It must make its own public, but I believe it
will do so. Come and let me hear you say you have forgotten my
words of last night. I didn't really mean them; you must have known
that."

His throat filled with tenderness and his head bowed in humility as he
read these good, sweet, womanly lines, and for the moment he was ready
to go to her and receive pardon kneeling. But as he thought of the wrong
he had done her, the misfortune he had brought upon her, a stubborn,
unaccountable resolution hardened his heart. "No, I will not go back
till I can go as her equal. I am broken and in disgrace now. I will not