business matters which do not concern us; for
in this story business conjures up the face of John Barclay--the
tanned, hard face of John Barclay, crackled with a hundred wrinkles
about the eyes, and scarred with hard lines about the furtive crafty
mouth; and we do not wish to see that face now; it should be hidden
while the new soul that is rising in his body struggles with that
tough, bronzed rind, gets a focus from the heart into those glaring
brass eyes, and teaches the lying lips to speak the truth, and having
spoken it to look it. And so while John Barclay in the City is daily
slipping millions of his railroad bonds into the market,--slipping
them in quietly yet steadily withal, mixing them into the daily
commerce of the country, so gently that they are absorbed before any
one knows they have left his long grasping fingers,--while he is
trading to his heart's content, let us forget him, and look at this
young man, that September night, after he left Molly Brownwell,
sitting at his desk in the office with the telephone at his elbow,
with the smell of the ink from the presses in his nostrils, with the
silence of the deserted office becalming his soul, and with his
heart--a clean, strong, manly heart--full of the picture of a
woman's face, and the vision without a hope. In his brain are recorded
a thousand pictures, and millions of little fibres run all over this
brain, conjuring up those pictures, and if there are blue eyes in the
pictures, and lips in the pictures, and the pressure of hands, and the
touch of souls in the pictures,--they are Neal Ward's pictures,
--they are Mr. Higgin's pictures, and Mrs. Wiggin's pictures, and Mr.
Stiggin's pictures, my dears, and alack and alas, they are the
pictures of Miss Jones and Miss Lewis and Miss Thomas and Miss Smith,
for that matter; and so, my dears, if we would be happy we should be
careful even if we can't be good, for it is all for eternity, and
whatever courts may say, and whatever churches may say, and whatever
comes back with rings and letters and trinkets,--there is no divorce,
and the pictures always stay in the heart, and the sum of the pictures
is life.

So that September night Neal Ward went back over the old trail as
lovers always will, and then his pen began to write. Now in the nature
of things the first three words are not for our eyes, and to-night we
must not see the first three lines nor the first thirty, nor the last
three words nor the last three li