ld go
to his grave more deeply in debt to Sharlee Weyland than he stood at
this moment. But of course it was the trying that chiefly counted. The
fifty thousand dollars, which he would turn over to her as soon as he
got it--how he was counting on a sum as big as that!--would be a help;
so would the three or four thousand a year which he counted on paying
toward keeping down the interest. This money in itself would be a good.
But much better than that, it would stand as a gage that the son
acknowledged and desired to atone for his father's dishonor.

His book must stand aside now--it might be forever. Henceforward he must
count his success upon a cash-register. But to-night his pencil labored
and dragged. What he wrote he saw was not good. He could do harder
things than force himself to sit at a table and put writing upon paper;
but over the subtler processes of his mind, which alone yields the rich
fruit, no man is master. In an hour he put out his lamp, undressed in
the dark, and went to bed.

He lay on his back in the blackness, and in all the world he could find
nothing to think about but Sharlee Weyland.

Of all that she had done for him, in a personal way, he had at least
tried to give her some idea; he was glad to remember that now. And now
at the last, when he was nearer worthy than ever before, she had turned
him out because she believed that he had stooped to dishonor. She would
have forgiven his sonship; he had been mistaken about that. She had felt
sympathy and sorrow for Henry Surface's son, and not repulsion, for he
had read it in her face. But she could not forgive him a personal
dishonor. And he was glad that, so believing, she would do as she had
done; it was the perfect thing to do; to demand honor without a blemish,
or to cancel all. Never had she stood so high in his fancy as now when
she had ordered him out of her life. His heart leapt with the knowledge
that, though she would never know it, he was her true mate there, in
their pure passion for Truth.

Whatever else might or might not have been, the knowledge remained with
him that she herself had suspected and convicted him. In all that
mattered their friendship had ended there. Distrust was unbearable
between friends. It was a flaw in his little lady that she could believe
him capable of baseness.... But not an unforgivable flaw, it would seem,
since every hour that he had spent in her presence had become roses and
music in his memory, and the