t--well, then what? It
isn't as though I had any income of my own, or rich aunt. Suppose I
didn't find something to do--and the chances are that I wouldn't for
three or four months--what would I live on in the meanwhile? 'What
would the robin do then, poor thing?' I'm a poor young man, Miss
Bessemer, and I've got to eat. No; my only chance is 'to be
discovered' by a magazine or a publishing house or somebody, and get a
bid of some kind."

"Well, there is the Centennial Company. They have taken an interest in
you, Condy. You must follow that right up and keep your name before
them all the time. Have you sent them 'A Victory Over Death' yet?"

Condy sat down to his eggs and coffee the next morning in the hotel,
harried with a certain sense of depression and disappointment for which
he could assign no cause. Nothing seemed to interest him. The
newspaper was dull. He could look forward to no pleasure in his day's
work; and what was the matter with the sun that morning? As he walked
down to the office he noted no cloud in the sky, but the brightness was
gone from the day. He sat down to his desk and attacked his work, but
"copy" would not come. The sporting editor and his inane jokes
harassed him beyond expression. Just the sight of the clipping
editor's back was an irritation. The office boy was a mere incentive
to profanity. There was no spring in Condy that morning, no
elasticity, none of his natural buoyancy. As the day wore on, his
ennui increased; his luncheon at the club was tasteless, tobacco had
lost its charm. He ordered a cocktail in the wine-room, and put it
aside with a wry face.

The afternoon was one long tedium. At every hour he flung his pencil
down, utterly unable to formulate the next sentence of his article,
and, his hands in his pockets, gazed gloomily out of the window over
the wilderness of roofs--grimy, dirty, ugly roofs that spread out
below. He craved diversion, amusement, excitement. Something there
was that he wanted with all his heart and soul; yet he was quite unable
to say what it was. Something was gone from him to-day that he had
possessed yesterday, and he knew he would not regain it on the morrow,
nor the next day, nor the day after that. What was it? He could not
say. For half an hour he imagined he was going to be sick. His mother
was not to be at home that evening, and Condy dined at his club in the
hopes of finding some one with whom he could go to the theatre l