I am
established securely in freedom. And when will that be?" In my mood of
darkness and despair, the answer to that question was a relentless,
"Never, especially if you are weighted with the sense of obligation to
her, of her wasting her youth in waiting for you."

I wrote her all that was in my mind. "You must forget me," I said, "and
I shall forget you--for I see that you are not for me."

The answer came by telegraph--"Please don't ever again hurt me in that
way." And of the letter which came two days later I remember clearly
this sentence: "If you will not let me go on with you, I will make the
journey alone."

This shook me, but I knew only too well how the bright and beautiful
legions of the romantic and the ideal could be put to flight, could be
hurled headlong into the abyss of oblivion by the phalanxes of fact.

"I see what I must do," was my answer to her letter. "And I shall do it.
Be merciful to me, Elizabeth. Do not tempt me to a worse cowardice than
giving you up. I shall not write again."

And I did not. Every one of her letters was answered--sometimes, I
remember, I wrote to her the whole night through, shading my window so
that mother could not from her window see the reflection of my lamp's
light on the ground and become anxious. But I destroyed those long and
often agonized answers. And I can not say whether my heart was the
heavier in the months when I was getting her letters, to which I dared
not reply, or in those succeeding months when her small, clear
handwriting first ceased to greet me from the mail.

IV

THE SCHOOL OF LIFE-AS-IT-IS

A day or so after I lost the only case of consequence I had had in more
than a year, Buck Fessenden came into my office, and, after dosing me
liberally with those friendly protestations and assurances which please
even when they do not convince, said: "I know you won't give me away,
Sayler, and I can't stand it any longer to watch you going on this way.
Don't you see the old man's after you hammer and tongs? He'll never let
up. You won't get no clients, and, if you do, _you won't win no cases_."

Those last five words, spoken in Buck's most significant manner,
revealed what my modesty--or, if you prefer, my stupidity--had hidden
from me. I had known all along that Dominick was keeping away and
driving away clients; but I had not suspected his creatures on the
bench. To this day, after all these years of use, only with the greatest
reluctance and