wo lines stay with me. I feel it that
way, too. It's the seal upon an act of violence, isn't it, a sunset?
Something taken from us against our will. It's a hateful reminder, in
the midst of our delightful volitions, of how arbitrary every condition
of life is."

"The conditions of business are always arbitrary. Life is a business--we
have to work at ourselves till it is over. So much cut off and ended it
is," he said, glancing at the sky again. "If space is the area of life
and time is its opportunity, there goes a measure of opportunity."

"I wonder," said Advena, "where it goes?"

"Into the void behind time?" he suggested, smiling straight at her.

"Into the texture of the future," she answered, smiling back.

"We might bring it to bear very intelligently on the future, at any
rate," he returned. "The world is wrapped in destiny, and but revolves
to roll it out."

"I don't remember that," she said curiously.

"No you couldn't," he laughed outright. "I haven't thought it good
enough to publish."

"And it isn't the sort of thing," she ventured gaily, "you could put in
a sermon."

"No, it isn't." They came to a corner of the street which led to Mr
Finlay's boarding-house. It stretched narrowly to the north and there
was a good deal more snow on each side of it. They lingered together for
a moment talking, seizing the new joy in it which was simply the joy of
his sudden liberation with her consciously pushing away the moment of
parting; and Finlay's eyes rested once again on the evening sky beyond
the river.

"I believe you are right and I am a moralizer," he said. "There IS
pain over there. One thinks a sunset beautiful and impressive, but one
doesn't look at it long."

Then they separated, and he took the road to the north, which was still
snowbound, while she went on into the chilly yellow west, with the odd
sweet illusion that a summer day was dawning.

CHAPTER IX

The office of Messrs Fulke, Warner, & Murchison was in Market Street,
exactly over Scott's drug store. Scott with his globular blue and red
and green vessels in the window and his soda-water fountain inside; was
on the ground floor; the passage leading upstairs separated him from
Mickie, boots and shoes; and beyond Mickie, Elgin's leading tobacconist
shared his place of business with a barber. The last two contributed
most to the gaiety of Market Street: the barber with the ribanded pole,
which stuck out at an angle; the tobacconist w