move Jim up. An older, they said steadier, man was
chosen." It was the oranges, he told himself, the oranges and brandy;
the cursed young fool. "You must come away, Mariana," he continued more
faintly; "fair trial, failure--something to yourself, our family."

"Leave Jimmy because he wasn't made superintendent!" she replied in an
abstracted impatience. Then, "I wonder about a smaller plant? Won't you
understand, Howat," she leaned softly over him; "I need Jim as badly as
he needs me; perhaps more. If I had any superior illusions they have all
gone. I can't tell us apart. Of course, I'd like him to get on, but
principally for himself. Jim, every bit of him, the drinking and
tempers, and tenderness you would never suspect, is my--oxygen. I can
see that you want to know if I am happy; but I can't tell you, Howat.
Perhaps that's the answer, and I am--I have a feeling of being a part of
something outside personal happiness, something that has tied Jim and me
together and gone on about a larger affair. You see, Howat, I wasn't
consulted," she added in a more familiar impudence; "whether I was
pleased or not didn't appear to matter. In a position like that it's
silly to talk about happiness as if it were like the thrill at your
first ball."

He drifted away from her through the nebulous haze deepening about him.
An occasional, objective buzzing penetrated to his removed place; but
all the while he realized that he was getting farther and farther from
such interruptions of an effort to distinguish a vaguely familiar,
veiled shape. He saw, at last, that it was Howat, a black Penny. It was
at once himself and that other Howat, yes, and Jasper. All three
unremarkably merged into one. And the acts of the first, a dark young
man with an erect, impatient carriage, a countenance and gaze of
vigorous scorn, accumulated in a later figure, hardly less upright,
slender, but touched with grey--a man in the middle of life. He paid
with an anguished spirit for what had taken place; and at last an old
man lingered with empty hands, the husk of a passion that had burned out
all vitality.

Mariana, too, had been drawn into the wide implications of this mingled
past and present. But now, clearly, he recognized in her the meeting of
spirit and flesh that had been denied to him. That was life, he thought,
that was happiness. In the absence of such consummation he had come to
nothing. In Jasper, in Susan Brundon who had married him over late, the