g, for the last time, over Mrs. Luna's plump
hand.

"I shall remember that and keep you up to it!" she cried after him, as
he went. But even with this rather lively exchange of vows he felt that
he had got off rather easily. He walked slowly up Fifth Avenue, into
which, out of Adeline's cross-street, he had turned, by the light of a
fine winter moon; and at every corner he stopped a minute, lingered in
meditation, while he exhaled a soft, vague sigh. This was an
unconscious, involuntary expression of relief, such as a man might utter
who had seen himself on the point of being run over and yet felt that he
was whole. He didn't trouble himself much to ask what had saved him;
whatever it was it had produced a reaction, so that he felt rather
ashamed of having found his look-out of late so blank. By the time he
reached his lodgings, his ambition, his resolution, had rekindled; he
had remembered that he formerly supposed he was a man of ability, that
nothing particular had occurred to make him doubt it (the evidence was
only negative, not positive), and that at any rate he was young enough
to have another try. He whistled that night as he went to bed.

XXIII

Three weeks afterward he stood in front of Olive Chancellor's house,
looking up and down the street and hesitating. He had told Mrs. Luna
that he should like nothing better than to make another journey to
Boston; and it was not simply because he liked it that he had come. I
was on the point of saying that a happy chance had favoured him, but it
occurs to me that one is under no obligation to call chances by
nattering epithets when they have been waited for so long. At any rate,
the darkest hour is before the dawn; and a few days after that
melancholy evening I have described, which Ransom spent in his German
beer-cellar, before a single glass, soon emptied, staring at his future
with an unremunerated eye, he found that the world appeared to have need
of him yet. The "party," as he would have said (I cannot pretend that
his speech was too heroic for that), for whom he had transacted business
in Boston so many months before, and who had expressed at the time but a
limited appreciation of his services (there had been between the lawyer
and his client a divergence of judgement), observing, apparently, that
they proved more fruitful than he expected, had reopened the affair and
presently requested Ransom to transport himself again to the sister
city. His errand de