rsonalities of
their former owners stirring in him when he picked them up. It was in
that room that he dreamed; which is to say, it was in that room that he
lived his real life.

Cleggett walked over to his writing desk and pulled out a bulky
manuscript. It was his own work. Is it necessary to hint that it was
a tale essentially romantic in character?

He flung it into the grate and set fire to it. It represented the
labor of two years, but as he watched it burn, stirring the sheets now
and then so the flames would catch them more readily, he smiled,
unvisited by even the most shadowy second thought of regret.

For why the deuce should a man with $500,000 in his pocket write
romances? Why should anyone write anything who is free to live? For
the first time in his existence Cleggett was free.

He picked up a sword. It was one of his favorite rapiers. Sometimes
people came out of the books--sometimes shadowy forms came back to
claim the weapons that had been theirs--and Cleggett fought them.
There was not an unscarred piece of furniture in the place. He bent
the flexible blade in his hands, tried the point of it, formally
saluted, brought the weapon to parade, dallied with his imaginary
opponent's sword for an instant....

It seemed as if one of those terrible, but brilliant, duels, with which
that room was so familiar, was about to be enacted.... But he laid the
rapier down. After all, the rapier is scarcely a thing of this
century. Cleggett, for the first time, felt a little impatient with
the rapier. It is all very well to DREAM with a rapier. But now, he
was free; reality was before him; the world of actual adventure called.
He had but to choose!

He considered. He tried to look into that bright, adventurous future.
Presently he went to the window, and gazed out. Tides of night and
mystery, flooding in from the farther, dark, mysterious ocean, all but
submerged lower Manhattan; high and beautiful above these waves of
shadow, triumphing over them and accentuating them, shone a star from
the top of the Woolworth building; flecks of light indicated the noble
curve of that great bridge which soars like a song in stone and steel
above the shifting waters; the river itself was dotted here and there
with moving lights; it was a nocturne waiting for its Whistler; here
sea and city met in glamour and beauty and illusion.

But it was not the city which called to Cleggett. It was the sea.

A breeze blew in