dropped away from him one by one, but others took their place. When
Walter balanced his books at the end of the first year, he had reason to
be not only content, but elated, and he was enabled to carry out at once
certain extensions which he had quite expected would only be justifiable
after the lapse of some years. But, while prospering beyond his highest
anticipations, what of the growth of the true man, the development of
the great human soul, which craves a higher destiny than mere grovelling
among the sordid things of earth? While supremely unconscious of any
change in himself, there was nevertheless a great change--a very great
change indeed. It was inevitable. A life so narrow, so circumscribed, so
barren of beauty, lived so solitarily, away from every softening
influence, was bound to work a subtle and relentless change. The man of
one idea is apt to starve his soul in his effort to make it subservient
to the furtherance of his solitary aim. To be a successful man, to win
by his own unaided effort a position which would entitle him to meet
Gladys Graham on equal ground, such was his ambition, and it never did
occur to him that this very striving might make him unfit in other ways
to be her mate. His isolated life, absolutely unrelieved by any social
intercourse with his fellows, made him silent by choice, still and
self-contained in manner, abrupt of speech. In his unconsciousness it
never occurred to him that it is the little courtesies and graces of
speech and action which commend a man first to the notice of the woman
he wants to win. He was, though he did not know it, a melancholy
spectacle; but his awakening was at hand.

Gladys made her second call at the house in Colquhoun Street, as before,
early in the day. It seemed very familiar, though it was many months
since she had passed that way. It seemed a more hopeless and squalid
street than she had yet thought it. She picked her steps daintily
through the greasy mud, holding her skirts high enough to show a most
bewitching pair of feet, cased in Parisian boots, only there was nobody
visible to admire them but a grimy butcher's boy, with a basket on his
head, and he stared with all his might.

The warehouse door, contrary to the old custom, stood wide open, as if
inviting all comers. Gladys gave a glance along the passage which led to
the living-rooms, but was not moved to revisit them. She went at once up
the grimy staircase, giving a little light cough a