leep at last, not because he forgot them, but because he
forgave them. He was able to say to himself that he had been justly cut
off from kindness which he knew how to value in losing it. He did not
expect ever to right himself in Alma's esteem, but he hoped some day to
let her know that he had understood. It seemed to him that it would be
a good thing if she should find it out after his death. He imagined her
being touched by it under those circumstances.

VI.

In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice.
When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it, he could not believe
that the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishment
Miss Leighton had inflicted upon him. He still forgave her, but in the
presence of a thing like that he could not help respecting himself; he
believed that if she could see it she would be sorry that she had cut
herself off from his acquaintance. He carried this strain of conviction
all through his syndicate letter, which he now took out of his desk and
finished, with an increasing security of his opinions and a mounting
severity in his judgments. He retaliated upon the general condition of
art among us the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma had made him feel,
and he folded up his manuscript and put it in his pocket, almost
healed of his humiliation. He had been able to escape from its sting so
entirely while he was writing that the notion of making his life more
and more literary commended itself to him. As it was now evident
that the future was to be one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an
oblivion tinged with bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor of
reconsidering his resolution against Fulkerson's offer. One must call
it reasoning, but it was rather that swift internal dramatization which
constantly goes on in persons of excitable sensibilities, and which now
seemed to sweep Beaton physically along toward the 'Every Other Week'
office, and carried his mind with lightning celerity on to a time when
he should have given that journal such quality and authority in matters
of art as had never been enjoyed by any in America before. With the
prosperity which he made attend his work he changed the character of the
enterprise, and with Fulkerson's enthusiastic support he gave the public
an art journal of as high grade as 'Les Lettres et les Arts', and very
much that sort of thing. All this involved now the unavailing regret of
Alma Leighton, and now