striking a light, sank into his large
reading chair, beside which the volumes used in the afternoon lay
littered on the floor.

He was suddenly penetrated with the cold of the night, and hung
shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What had happened to
him? In this room, in this chair, the self-forgetting excitement of
that walk, scarcely half an hour old, seems to him already long
past--incredible almost.

And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full of a
hundred new impressions. That fair head against his breast, those
soft confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah! it is the poor, silent,
insignificant student that has conquered. It is he, not the successful
man of the world, that has held that young and beautiful girl in his
arms, and heard from her the sweetest and humblest confession of love.
Fate can have neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so; but
fate has so ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal
note also, that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.

So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which
life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt
the torturing thrill of passion--he has evoked such an answer as all
men might envy him,--and fresh from Rose's kiss, from Rose's beauty,
the strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion,
her response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of
gratitude and tenderness; the next--is nothing what it promises to
be?--and has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost
some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where
its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy charm?

The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would rattle over
the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step would penetrate
the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock of sound into that
silent upper room. Nothing caught Langham's ear. He was absorbed in the
dialogue which was to decide his life.

Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction of
himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and ghastly argument.

'But I love her!--I love her! A little courage--a little effort--and I
too can achieve what other men achieve. I have gifts, great gifts. Mere
contact with her, the mere necessities of the situation, will drive me
back to life, teach me how to live