babyish
face could have become a creature to whom vice was a desired familiar
thing.

"Did the outcome lie in my hands? and might I have prevented it?" he
demanded. "If I had stood in the way of her impulse, would it have
turned aside from me at the last?" And the salvation of the world
appeared to him to depend upon just this courageous coming between evil
and the desire which it invited--for had not the soul of the weak, been
delivered, in spite of all moral subterfuge, into the power of the
strong?

Then his vision broadened, and he looked from Connie's life to the lives
of men and women who were more fortunate than she; but all human
existence, everywhere one and the same, showed to him as the ceaseless
struggle after the illusion of a happiness which had no part in any
possession nor in any object. He thought of Laura, with the radiance of
her illusion still upon her; of Gerty, groping after the torn and
soiled shreds of hers; of Kemper, stripped of his and yet making the
pretence that it had not left him naked; of Perry Bridewell, dragging
his through the defiling mire that led to emptiness; and then of all the
miserable multitude of those that live for pleasure. And he saw them,
one and all, bound to the wheel which turned even as he looked.

The door across the hall opened and they brought Connie out, breathing
quietly and still unconscious. He followed the stretcher downstairs; but
after they had placed her upon the bed, he came back again and sat down,
as before, in the little stuffy room. Presently he would go home, he
thought, but as the night wore on, he became too exhausted for further
effort, and closing his eyes at last, he fell heavily asleep.

When he awoke the day was already breaking, and the electric light
burned dimly in the general wash of grayness. About him the atmosphere
had a strangely sketchy effect, as if it had been laid on crudely with a
few strokes from a paint brush.

The window was still open, and going over to it he leaned out and stood
for several minutes, too tired to make the necessary effort to collect
his thoughts, while he looked across the sleeping city to the pale amber
dawn which was beginning to streak the sky with colour. The silence was
very great; in the faint light the ordinary objects upon which he
gazed--the familiar look of the houses and the streets--appeared to him
less the forms of a material substance than the result of some shadowy
projection of mind. All th