down to defeat before
elemental instincts. His soul was steeped in gloom, but his
intelligence had not yet succumbed to passion. The beauty of
Columbine's character and the nobility of Moore's were not illusions to
Wade. They were true. These two were of the finest fiber of human
nature. They loved. They represented youth and hope--a progress through
the ages toward a better race. Wade believed in the good to be, in the
future of men. Nevertheless, all that was fine and worthy in Columbine
and Moore was to go unrewarded, unfulfilled, because of the selfish
pride of an old man and the evil passion of the son. It was a conflict
as old as life. Of what avail were Columbine's high sense of duty,
Moore's fine manhood, the many victories they had won over the headlong
and imperious desires of love? What avail were Wade's good offices, his
spiritual teaching, his eternal hope in the order of circumstances
working out to good? These beautiful characteristics of virtue were not
so strong as the unchangeable passion of old Belllounds and the vicious
depravity of his son. Wade could not imagine himself a god, proving that
the wages of sin was death. Yet in his life he had often been an
impassive destiny, meting out terrible consequences. Here he was
incalculably involved. This was the cumulative end of years of mounting
plots, tangled and woven into the web of his pain and his remorse and
his ideal. But hope was dying. That was his strife-realization against
the morbid clairvoyance of his mind. He could not help Jack Belllounds
to be a better man. He could not inspire the old rancher to a
forgetfulness of selfish and blinded aims. He could not prove to Moore
the truth of the reward that came from unflagging hope and unassailable
virtue. He could not save Columbine with his ideals.

The night wore on, and Wade plodded under the rustling aspens. The
insects ceased to hum, the owls to hoot, the wolves to mourn. The
shadows of the long spruces gradually merged into the darkness of night.
Above, infinitely high, burned the pale stars, wise and cold, aloof and
indifferent, eyes of other worlds of mystery.

In those night hours something in Wade died, but his idealism,
unquenchable and inexplicable, the very soul of the man, saw its
justification and fulfilment in the distant future.

The gray of the dawn stole over the eastern range, and before its opaque
gloom the blackness of night retreated, until valley and slope and grove
were s