were interlined and blurred and almost illegible. It
was already three o'clock when I reached my room, and the mail left at
four. I began to copy and revise my scrawl, glancing from time to time
at my watch, which I had laid on the table. Hurriedly washing my
face and brushing my hair, I arrived downstairs just as the stage was
leaving....

After the letter had gone still other arguments I might have added began
to occur to me, and I regretted that I had not softened some of the
things I wrote and made others more emphatic. In places argument
had degenerated into abject entreaty. Never had my desire been so
importunate as now, when I was in continual terror of losing her. Nor
could I see how I was to live without her, life lacking a motive being
incomprehensible: yet the fire of optimism in me, though died down to
ashes, would not be extinguished. At moments it flared up into what
almost amounted to a conviction that she could not resist my appeal. I
had threatened to go to her, and more than once I started packing....

Three days later I received a brief note in which she managed to convey
to me, though tenderly and compassionately, that her decision was
unalterable. If I came on, she would refuse to see me. I took the
afternoon stage and went back to the city, to plunge into affairs again;
but for weeks my torture was so acute that it gives me pain to recall
it, to dwell upon it to-day.... And yet, amazing as it may seem, there
came a time when hope began to dawn again out of my despair. Perhaps
my life had not been utterly shattered, after all: perhaps Ham Durrett
would get well: such things happened, and Nancy would no longer have an
excuse for continuing to refuse me. Little by little my anger at what
I had now become convinced was her weakness cooled, and--though
paradoxically I had continued to love her in spite of the torture for
which she was responsible, in spite of the resentment I felt, I melted
toward her. True to my habit of reliance on miracles, I tried to
reconcile myself to a period of waiting.

Nevertheless I was faintly aware--consequent upon if not as a result of
this tremendous experience--of some change within me. It was not only
that I felt at times a novel sense of uneasiness at being a prey to
accidents, subject to ravages of feeling; the unity of mind that had
hitherto enabled me to press forward continuously toward a concrete
goal showed signs of breaking up:--the goal had lost its desirabil