the state capital, and
one evening knocked on the door of Boone Wellver's hotel room.

When the messenger arrived, Boone was sitting alone with a brooding
face, while in his hand he held a telegram which had fallen like an
unwarned bolt on his lascerated soreness of spirit.

Two hours ago he had received and read it. In it Victor McCalloway had
said: "Deeply regret not seeing you for farewell. Called suddenly for
indefinite absence. Luck and prosperity to you always."

Luck and prosperity! Boone just now was hoping at best to fend off
despair and a total disintegration of a hard-built structure of ideals.
To McCalloway his thoughts had turned for the succour of a steadying
calm--and that one ally was no longer in reach. Boone had read the words
with a numbed heart, for now out of the confusion of tempest-smother
that beat about him he had lost even the solace of the bell-buoy's
strong note.

This misfortune, be assured himself, at least exhausted the
possibilities of perverse circumstance to hurt him. Misfortune's box of
tricks were empty now!

Tonight Colonel Wallifarro was entertaining at dinner. Anne would be
smiling as they congratulated her. A little while ago he had been at
just such a dinner, marvelling greatly at the good fortune that had
brought to him such progress. Now it stood for the emptiness of effort.

Tonight he wanted the hills--not calm and star-lit, but rocking to
hurricane fury and thundering with flood. No voice of all their voices
could be too wild or ruthless for his temper.

Boone was in a dangerous mood. He sat there with no eye to censor him,
and more than once he winced, biting back an outcry. His strongly thewed
shoulders heaved and flinched with thoughts that fell on quivering
brain-nerves like the merciless lashing of an invisible scourge. He
tried to analyze himself and his relation to affairs outside himself,
but his psychological attuning was pitched only to such an agony as
cries for outlet. Everything that he was, he bitterly reflected, was a
summary of acquired ethics designed to bury and hide his natural
heritages. He was a tamed and performing wild animal, and just now the
only assuagement that tempted him was the instinct to be wild again--to
lash out and punish some one for his hurting.

The star that had led him had gone out, but one could not punish a star.
Even in his frenzied wretchedness he could not even want to punish his
star.

But her world--to which he had c