r. He had a tortured look,
the look of a man who has fallen from unknowable heights--from an
Elysium which he regrets and desires with all a strong man's strength,
but to which the way back is irrevocably barred by the degradation and
the sin of the descent--and who, all but overwhelmed by the knowledge
that he can never return whence he came, yet bears his eternal loss with
an iron courage that has about it a kind of splendor.

Barbara Ferris felt that she was looking upon Satan in that moment when
he first realized that his fall from heaven was for eternity and that,
against every torturing passion of conviction, he must turn his talents
and his fearful courage to the needs of hell.

In that first moment of their meeting, she realized nothing about the
man but the terribly moving expression of his face. Nothing else
mattered. If her plastic training was equal to catching and fixing that
expression in clay or marble, she would be made according to the mould
of her ambition. The flame of art burned white and clear in the inmost
shrine of her being. She saw before her, and beneath her, not a human
being, but an inspiration. And since inspiration is a thing swift,
electric, and trebly enticing from the fact that it presents itself
shorn of all those difficulties which afterward, during execution, so
terribly appear and multiply, her heart beat already with the exquisite
bliss of an immortal achievement. In her vocabulary at that instant it
would have been impossible to discover under B the aggressive But, or
under I the faltering If. She was inspired. It was enough.

Then she, in whose mind strong wings had suddenly sprouted, perceived
that the person directly responsible had not even a pair of legs, and
felt throughout her whole being a cold gushing of horror and revolt.

This was not lost upon Blizzard. It was an ordinary enough human
sensation, whose reflections had often enough given the iron that was in
his soul another twist and refreshed in him vengefulness and hatred. Yet
on the present occasion the knowledge that he was physically loathed
roused in the man a feeling rather of that despair which may be
experienced by the drowning at that precise moment when the straw so
eagerly clutched has proved itself a straw, and he winced as beneath a
shocking blow between the eyes.

On discovering that the creature was maimed it had been Barbara's first
impulse to pass swiftly on. But another glance at the face which had