eap. There
in the darkness he seemed to see things, for the first time in his life,
quite as they were. His gaze, accustomed to the glittering promise of
the future, peered fearfully into the past, and reviewed the long line
of groundless hopes, of empty projects, of self-deceptions. Shorn of its
petty shams and deceits, and stripped of its counterfeit armor of
conceit, his life lay naked before him, a pitiful, starved, futile
thing.

"I've just been similar to Kippy," he sobbed, with his face in his
hands, "continually pretending what wasn't so. I acted like I was young,
and good-looking, and--and highly educated; and look at me! Look at me!"
he demanded fiercely of the kindling-wood.

Mr. Opp had been fighting a long duel--a duel with Circumstance, and Mr.
Opp was vanquished. The acknowledgment of defeat, even to himself, gave
it the final stamp of verity. He had fought valiantly, with what poor
weapons he had, but the thrusts had been too many and too sure. He lay
clothed in his strange new garment of humility, and wondered why he did
not want to die. He did not realize that in losing everything else, he
had won the greater stake of character for which he had been
unconsciously fighting all along.

The kitchen door opened, and he saw Miss Kippy's figure silhouetted
against the light.

"Brother D.," she called impatiently, "ain't you coming back to play
with me?"

He scrambled to his feet and made a hasty and somewhat guilty effort to
compose himself.

"Yes, I'm a-coming," he answered briskly, as he smoothed his scant locks
and straightened his tie. "You go on ahead and gather up the blocks; I
only stopped playing for a little spell."

XVIII

The marriage of Guinevere Gusty and Willard Hinton took place in
mid-winter, and the account of it, published in the last issue of "The
Opp Eagle," proved that the eagle, like the swan, has its death-song.

Like many of the masterpieces of literature, the article had been
written in anguish of spirit; but art, like nature, ignores the process,
and reckons only the result, and the result, in Mr. Opp's opinion at
least, more than justified the effort.

"In these strenuous, history-making meanderings of the sands of life,"
it ran, "we sometimes overlook or neglect particulars in events which
prove of larger importance than appears on the surface. The case to
which we have allusion to is the wedding which was solemnized at
eventide at the residence of the bride'