t. He was a coward, running away at the first threat of
danger. It was as if he were watching a tall stranger with a wand
pointing to the embarrassed phantom that was himself, and ruthlessly
exposing its frailties! And yet the pitiless showman was himself
too--himself as he wanted to be, cheerful, brave, resourceful,
indomitable.

Dickson suffered a spasm of mortal agony. "Oh, I'm surely not so bad
as all that," he groaned. But the hurt was not only in his pride. He
saw himself being forced to new decisions, and each alternative was of
the blackest. He fairly shivered with the horror of it. The car
slipped past a suburban station from which passengers were
emerging--comfortable black-coated men such as he had once been. He was
bitterly angry with Providence for picking him out of the great crowd
of sedentary folk for this sore ordeal. "Why was I tethered to sich a
conscience?" was his moan. But there was that stern inquisitor with
his pointer exploring his soul. "You flatter yourself you have done
your share," he was saying. "You will make pretty stories about it to
yourself, and some day you may tell your friends, modestly disclaiming
any special credit. But you will be a liar, for you know you are
afraid. You are running away when the work is scarcely begun, and
leaving it to a few boys and a poet whom you had the impudence the
other day to despise. I think you are worse than a coward. I think
you are a cad."

His fellow-passengers on the top of the car saw an absorbed middle-aged
gentleman who seemed to have something the matter with his bronchial
tubes. They could not guess at the tortured soul. The decision was
coming nearer, the alternatives loomed up dark and inevitable. On one
side was submission to ignominy, on the other a return to that place
which he detested, and yet loathed himself for detesting. "It seems
I'm not likely to have much peace either way," he reflected dismally.

How the conflict would have ended had it continued on these lines I
cannot say. The soul of Mr. McCunn was being assailed by moral and
metaphysical adversaries with which he had not been trained to deal.
But suddenly it leapt from negatives to positives. He saw the face of
the girl in the shuttered House, so fair and young and yet so haggard.
It seemed to be appealing to him to rescue it from a great loneliness
and fear. Yes, he had been right, it had a strange look of his
Janet--the wide-open eyes, the solemn mou