ntagion of the universal enthusiasm and had given
him her first ungrudging token of approval. It had altered his whole
outlook on life in an instant, for there was an eagerness in this
demonstration which proclaimed the relieved heart. She no longer trusted
either appearances or her dream. He had succeeded in conquering her
doubts by the very force of his personality, and the shadow which had
hitherto darkened their intercourse had melted quite away. She was ready
to take his word now and Oswald's, after which the rest must follow.
Love does not lag far behind an ardent admiration.

Fame! Fortune! Love! What more could a man desire? What more could this
man, with his strenuous past and an unlimited capacity for an enlarged
future, ask from fate than this. Yet, as he bends over his letters,
fingering some, but reading none beyond a line or two, he betrays but a
passing elation, and hardly lifts his head when a burst of loud acclaim
comes ringing up to his window from some ardent passer-by: "Hurrah for
Brotherson! He has put our town on the map!"

Why this despondency? Have those two demons seized him again? It would
seem so and with new and overmastering fury. After the hour of triumph
comes the hour of reckoning. Orlando Brotherson in his hour of proud
attainment stands naked before his own soul's tribunal and the pleader
is dumb and the judge inexorable. There is but one Witness to such
struggles; but one eye to note the waste and desolation of the
devastated soul, when the storm is over past.

Orlando Brotherson has succumbed; the attack was too keen, his forces
too shaken. But as the heavy minutes pass, he slowly re-gathers his
strength and rises, in the end, a conqueror. Nevertheless, he knows,
even in that moment of regained command, that the peace he had thus
bought with strain and stress is but momentary; that the battle is
on for life: that the days which to other eyes would carry a sense of
brilliancy--days teeming with work and outward satisfaction--would
hold within their hidden depths a brooding uncertainty which would rob
applause of its music and even overshadow the angel face of Love.

He quailed at the prospect, materialist though he was. The days--the
interminable days! In his unbroken strength and the glare of the noonday
sun, he forgot to take account of the nights looming in black and
endless procession before him. It was from the day phantom he shrank,
and not from the ghoul which works in the da