thers have said the same thing.
Yes, I'll close with Pilcher & Reed in the morning. I'll hang up my hat
in that office and try my hand at a new game for one week, anyway."

* * * * *

When he waked the next morning, however, he felt oppressed by a weighty
sense of the things he had renounced forever. The new work he was about
to undertake no longer charmed him. His entire outlook now seemed
chaotic, futile. How could he go ahead--with any sort of heart--in this
drab life among strangers, and leave forever behind him the memory of
his ecstatic honeymoon with the sweet, pulsing mate of his choice? It
simply could not be done. It was beyond mortal strength. He told himself
that he had kept himself keyed up to the present point by continual
change and rapid movement since leaving Tilly, but the ultimate test was
on him. With a groan from a tight throat, and smothering another in his
pillow, he told himself over and over that his career was ended. Tilly
was free--there was comfort in that. With the news of his death in the
wreck, she would bury him as widows have always buried their mates, and
life for her would roll on, but she would remain alive to him as long as
the breath came and went from his cheerless frame.

"Brother John!" It was Dora calling to him. "Are you awake?"

He started to answer, but his voice was clogged and he was afraid to
trust it to utterance. She called again and then appeared fully dressed
in the doorway, the primer in her hands. She approached his bedside.
"Will you please tell me what this darned letter is? I can say them all,
I think, down to it. What comes after O?"

"P," he answered. "Who taught you the others?"

"Betty. And Q comes next," she went on, holding the book closed. "Then
R, S, T-- What comes after T, brother John?" He told her, and she sat
down on the edge of his bed, and for ten minutes he helped her learn the
part of the alphabet she did not know.

The first bell for breakfast rang, and she left him. He stood up and
stretched himself. "Be ashamed of yourself, John Trott," he muttered.
"There is that poor kid trying to rise, and yet you are complaining. It
is your damned yellow streak, or your liver is out of order. Throw it
off, you whelp! Be a man! Women suffer in childbirth--children suffer
under operations, crushed bones, and blindness. Your own father had his
hell on earth. Stop whining over spilled milk. Think what you may be
able to do f