ing
that you want to say.

"I did manage, when he was through, to ask him whether or not he wished
to make a statement. That was all from me, mind you, and yet I'd gone
out there with the idea in my head of getting material for a long newsy
piece out of him--what we call in this business heart-interest stuff.
All he said, though, as he handed me back the slips was, 'No, sir; but I
thank you--from the bottom of my heart I thank you.' And then he shook
hands with me--shook hands with me like a man who'd forgotten almost
how 'twas done--and he walked in his house and shut the door behind him,
and I came on away feeling exactly as though I had seen a funeral turned
into a resurrection."

Editor Tompkins thought he had that day written the final chapter, but
he hadn't. The final chapter he was to write the next day, following
hard upon a denouement which to Mr. Tompkins, he with his own eyes
having seen what he had seen, was so profound a puzzle that ever
thereafter he mentally catalogued it under one of his favorite
headlining phrases: "Deplorable Affair Shrouded in Mystery."

Let us go back a few hours. For a fact, Mr. Tompkins had been witness to
a spirit's resurrection. It was as he had borne testimony--a life had
been reborn before his eyes. Even so, he, the sole spectator to and
chronicler of the glory of it, could not know the depth and the sweep
and the swing of the great heartening swell of joyous relief which
uplifted Dudley Stackpole at the reading of the dead Bledsoe's words.
None save Dudley Stackpole himself was ever to have a true appreciation
of the utter sweetness of that cleansing flood, nor he for long.

As he closed his door upon the editor, plans, aspirations, ambitions
already were flowing to his brain, borne there upon that ground swell of
sudden happiness. Into the back spaces of his mind long-buried desires
went riding like chips upon a torrent. The substance of his patiently
endured self-martyrdom was lifted all in a second, and with it the
shadow of it. He would be thenceforth as other men, living as they
lived, taking, as they did, an active share and hand in communal life.
He was getting old. The good news had come late, but not too late. That
day would mark the total disappearance of the morbid lonely recluse and
the rejuvenation of the normal-thinking, normal-habited citizen. That
very day he would make a beginning of the new order of things.

And that very day he did; at least he tried.