trodden and gasping in the narrow bounds of poverty and
helplessness. Miss Challoner had roused--well, his pride. He could see
that now. The might of this new emotion made plain many things he had
passed by as useless, puerile, unworthy of a man of mental calibre
and might. He had never loved Edith Challoner at any moment of their
acquaintanceship, though he had been sincere in thinking that he did.
Doris' beauty, the hour he had just passed with her, had undeceived him.

Did he hail the experience? It was not likely to bring him joy. This
young girl whose image floated in light before his eyes, would never
love him. She loved his brother. He had heard their names mentioned
together before he had been in town an hour. Oswald, the cleverest man,
Doris, the most beautiful girl in Western Pennsylvania.

He had accepted the gossip then; he had not seen her and it all seemed
very natural;--hardly worth a moment's thought. But now!

And here, the other Demon sprang erect and grappled with him before the
first one had let go his hold. Oswald and Challoner! The secret, unknown
something which had softened that hard man's eye when his brother's
name was mentioned! He had noted it and realised the mystery; a mystery
before which sleep and rest must fly; a mystery to which he must now
give his thought, whatever the cost, whatever the loss to those heavenly
dreams the magic of which was so new it seemed to envelope him in the
balm of Paradise. Away, then, image of light! Let the faculties thou
hast dazed, act again. There is more than Fate's caprice in Challoner's
interest in a man he never saw. Ghosts of old memories rise and demand
a hearing. Facts, trivial and commonplace enough to have been lost in
oblivion with the day which gave them birth, throng again from the past,
proving that nought dies without a possibility of resurrection. Their
power over this brooding man is shown by the force with which his
fingers crush against his bowed forehead. Oswald and Challoner! Had he
found the connecting link? Had it been--could it have been Edith? The
preposterous is sometimes true; could it be true in this case?

He recalled the letters read to him as hers in that room of his in
Brooklyn. He had hardly noted them then, he was so sure of their being
forgeries, gotten up by the police to mislead him. Could they have been
real, the effusions of her mind, the breathings of her heart, directed
to an actual O. B., and that O. B., his brothe