to the soul he stared at the wreck of a friendship.
Nothing will more deeply sicken the heart of a naturally loyal man than
to discover baseless his faith in some one he has thoroughly trusted.

Orde had liked Newmark. He had admired heartily his clearness of
vision, his financial skill, his knowledge of business intricacies,
his imperturbable coolness, all the abilities that had brought him to
success. With a man of Orde's temperament, to admire is to like; and to
like is to invest with all good qualities. He had constructed his ideal
of a friend, with Newmark as a basis; and now that this, which had
seemed to him as solid a reality as a brick block, had dissolved into
nothing, he found himself in the necessity of refashioning his whole
world. He was not angry at Newmark. But he was grieved down to the
depths of his being.

When the full sun shone into the library, he aroused himself to change
his clothes. Then, carrying those he had just discarded, he slipped out
of the house and down the street. Duke, the black and white setter dog,
begged to follow him. Orde welcomed the animal's company. He paused only
long enough to telephone from the office telling Carroll he would be out
of town all day. Then he set out at a long swinging gait over the hills.
By the time the sun grew hot, he was some miles from the village and in
the high beech woods. There he sat down, his back to a monster tree.
All day long he gazed steadily on the shifting shadows and splotches
of sunlight; on the patches of blue sky, the dazzling white clouds that
sailed across them; on the waving, whispering frond that over-arched
him, and the deep cool shadows beneath. The woods creatures soon became
accustomed to his presence. Squirrels of the several varieties that
abounded in the Michigan forests scampered madly after each other in
spirals around the tree trunks, or bounded across the ground in long
undulating leaps. Birds flashed and called and disappeared mysteriously.
A chewink, brave in his black and white and tan uniform, scratched
mightily with great two-footed swoops that threw the vegetable mould
over Orde's very feet. Blazoned butterflies--the yellow and black
turnus, the dark troilus, the shade-loving nymphalis--flickered in and
out of the patches of sunlight. Orde paid them no attention. The noon
heat poured down through the forest isles like an incense. Overhead
swung the sun, and down the slope until the long shafts of its light
lifted wa