rotestations. "I'll see you again to-morrow--there's really not the
faintest need to hurry."

And with a feeling that he was stifling in the over-heated
flower-scented rooms, he went quickly from the house into the street.

There was no reason why the news of Laura should disquiet him--by no
possible twist of his imagination could he bring the event of her
marriage into any direct bearing on his own life, yet as he walked at
his rapid, nervous pace toward his home in Thirty-fifth Street, he felt
a burning sore like a great jagged wound in his breast. That merely
human part of him, which was mixed so vitally into the intellectual
fervour of his love, suffered from the loss almost as if it had been
some fresh physical hurt. Was it possible that his avowal of
renunciation had sought to keep back some particular treasure? some
darling frailty? Or was his suffering at the moment but the first
involuntary quiver of the nerves which would pass presently leaving him
at one with his fate again? "Was I content to give her up only so long
as she belonged to no other man?" he asked. "Could I have relinquished
her friendship so easily had I known that her love was not for me, but
for Kemper?" Again the image of Kemper appeared to him, genial,
impulsive, sensual--and he felt that if it had been another and a
different man, he could have borne the loss of Laura with a finer
courage.

Then the unworthiness of his mental attitude forced itself upon his
reflections, and he realised that with his first return to his old state
of selfish blindness, the illumination that had shone in his soul was
gradually obscured. Could it happen to him that he should again lose the
light? Again walk in darkness? His thoughts were no longer clear with
that crystalline clearness of the day before, and it seemed to him
suddenly that the key to all wisdom, which he had found so lately, had
failed at the critical moment to unlock the fortified doors. That
temporary and purely human reaction, which is the inevitable fleeting
shadow cast on the mind by any spiritual irradiation, appeared in his
present mood to contain within itself the ultimate abyss of failure. The
single instant when he lost hold on God stretched itself into an
eternity of nothingness through his soul.

He had walked rapidly and far, and looking up at his first almost
automatic stop, he found that he had not only passed by his own house,
but that he had come as far down as the corner of T