penetrate here. He might even shout her name
aloud, and only these windowless walls would respond. He was alone with
his past, his present and his future.

Alone!

He needed to be. The strongest must pause when the precipice yawns
before him. The gulf can be spanned; he feels himself forceful enough
for that; but his eyes must take their measurement of it first; he must
know its depths and possible dangers. Only a fool would ignore these
steeps of jagged rock; and he was no fool, only a man to whom the
unexpected had happened, a man who had seen his way clear to the horizon
and then had come up against this! Love, when he thought such folly
dead! Remorse, when Glory called for the quiet mind and heart!

He recognised its mordant fang, and knew that its ravages, though
only just begun, would last his lifetime. Nothing could stop them now,
nothing, nothing. And he laughed, as the thought went home; laughed at
the irony of fate and its inexorableness; laughed at his own defeat and
his nearness to a barred Paradise. Oswald loved Edith, loved her yet,
with a flame time would take long to quench. Doris loved Oswald and he
Doris; and not one of them would ever attain the delights each was so
fitted to enjoy. Why shouldn't he laugh? What is left to man but mockery
when all props fall? Disappointment was the universal lot; and it should
go merrily with him if he must take his turn at it. But here the strong
spirit of the man re-asserted itself; it should be but a turn. A man's
joys are not bounded by his loves or even by the satisfaction of a
perfectly untrammelled mind. Performance makes a world of its own for
the capable and the strong, and this was still left to him. He, Orlando
Brotherson, despair while his great work lay unfinished! That would be
to lay stress on the inevitable pains and fears of commonplace humanity.
He was not of that ilk. Intellect was his god; ambition his motive
power. What would this casual blight upon his supreme contentment be
to him, when with the wings of his air-car spread, he should spurn the
earth and soar into the heaven of fame simultaneously with his flight
into the open.

He could wait for that hour. He had measured the gulf before him and
found it passable. Henceforth no looking back.

Rising, he stood for a moment gazing, with an alert eye now, upon such
sections of his car as had not yet been fitted into their places; then
he bent forward to his work, and soon the lips which had ut