ng from a star, hisses out its life in the
mud.

The woman pure--Alice--the very thought of her sent him farther into
the mud, knowing she could not be his. She alone whom he had wanted
to wed all his life, the goal of his love's ambition, the one woman
in the world he had never doubted would one day be his wife.

Her note to him--"_Never ... never ... again_"--he kept reading it
over, stunned, and pale, with the truth of it. In his blindness it
had never occurred to him that Alice Westmore and Maggie would ever
meet. In his blindness--for Wrong, daring as a snake, which, however
alert and far-seeing it may be in the hey-day of its spring, sees
less clearly as the Summer advances, until, in the August of its
infamy, it ceases to see altogether and becomes an easy victim for
all things with hoofs.

Then, the poignant reawakening. Now he lay in the mud and above him
still shone the star.

The star--his star! And how it hurt him! It was the breaking of a
link in the chain of his life.

Twice had he written to her. But each time his notes came back
unopened. Twice had he gone to Westmoreland to see her. Mrs. Westmore
met him at the door, cordial, sympathetic, but with a nervous jerk in
the little metallic laugh. His first glance at her told him she knew
everything--and yet, knew nothing. Alice was locked in her room and
would not see him.

"But, oh, Richard," and again she laughed her little insincere,
unstable, society laugh, beginning with brave frankness in one corner
of her mouth and ending in a hypocritical wave of forgetfulness
before it had time to finish the circle, but fluttering out into a
cynical twitching of a thing which might have been a smile or a
sneer--

"True love--you know--dear Richard--you must remember the old
saying."

She pressed his hand sympathetically. The mouth said nothing, but the
hand said plainly: "Do not despair--I am working for a home at The
Gaffs."

He pitied her, for there was misery in her eyes and in her laugh and
in the very touch of her hand. Misery and insincerity, and that
terrible mental state when weakness is roped up between the two and
knows, for once in its life, that it has no strength at all.

And she pitied him, for never before on any human face had she seen
the terrible irony of agony. Agony she had often seen--but not this
irony of it--this agony that saw all its life's happiness blasted and
knew it deserved it.

Richard Travis, when he left Westmoreland