will you believe how
very, very much I honor you? And when I see you again there won't
be--we'll both forget all about to-night, won't we? We'll just be the
old Carl and Gertie again. Tell me to come when----"

"Yes. I will. Goodnight."

"Good night, Gertie. God bless you."

* * * * *

He never remembered where he walked that night when he had left
Gertie. The exercise, the chill of the night, gradually set his numbed
mind working again. But it dwelt with Ruth, not with Gertie. Now that
he had given words to his longing for Ruth, to his pride in her, he
understood that he had passed the hidden border of that misty land
called "being in love," which cartographers have variously described
as a fruitful tract of comfortable harvests, as a labyrinth with walls
of rose and silver, and as a tenebrous realm of unhappy ghosts.

He stopped at a street corner where, above a saloon with a large
beer-sign, stretched dim tenement windows toward a dirty sky; and on
that drab corner glowed for a moment the mystic light of the Rose of
All the World--before a Tammany saloon! Chin high, yearning toward a
girl somewhere off to the south, Carl poignantly recalled how Ruth had
worshiped the stars. His soul soared, lark and hawk in one, triumphant
over the matter-of-factness of daily life. Carl Ericson the mechanic,
standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side and a
cigars-and-stationery shop round the corner, was one with the young
priest saying mass, one with the suffragist woman defying a jeering
mob, one with Ruth Winslow listening to the ringing stars.

"God--help--me--to--be--worthy--of--her!"

Nothing more did he say, in words, yet he was changed for ever.

Changed. True that when he got home, half an hour later, and in the
dark ran his nose against an opened door, he said, "Damn it!" very
naturally. True that on Monday, back in the office that awaits its
victims equally after Sundays golden or dreary, he forgot Ruth's
existence for hours at a time. True that at lunch with two VanZile
automobile salesmen he ate _Wiener Schnitzel_ and shot dice for
cigars, with no signs of a mystic change. It is even true that, dining
at the Brevoort with Charley Forbes, he though of Istra Nash, and for
a minute was lonely for Istra's artistic dissipation. Yet the change
was there.

CHAPTER XXXIII

From Titherington, the aviator, in his Devonshire home, from a
millionaire amateur flier am