t: "Annulment
of Young Bride's Marriage and Tragic End of Husband."

John read the crudely considerate item through, folded the sheet, and
restored the file to its place. Then he started back to his office. How
pitiless seemed the street scene in the garish light of the midday sun!
The push-cart men, the newsboys, the hurrying throng, the rattling of
the overhead trains, seemed to belong to an earthly hades. And why, he
wondered, should he suffer so over a thing that he had already accepted
as a fact, and partly conquered? He couldn't have answered, though a
psychologist might have classed it under the head of autosuggestion, or
called it a mere backward twist of a morbid imagination fed by
unsubdued, subconscious longings for things the subject once possessed.

That night strange, dazzling dreams fell to John's portion. If by his
hard work he was enabled through the day to keep his old life out of his
conscious thought to any extent, it was often otherwise when he slept,
and to-night, following the shock he had had that morning, he was living
only too vividly over the period in which he had known Tilly. Again he
was entranced by her illumined face and thrilled by her mellow treble
voice as she read from the Bible that first night of his acquaintance
with her. Again he and she were on the lonely, moonlit mountain road
together. He felt her loving pressure on his arm, and as by the light of
heaven caught her tender, upward glance. Then she became his
wife--actually his wife. They were on the train together--in the cab at
Ridgeville, and then in that cottage of dreams and delight, shut in from
the uncomprehending world without.

Then he awoke and, like the hail of javelins from an omnipotent enemy,
the tragic facts of his existence hurtled down upon him. Smothering a
cry like that of a wounded beast in a jungle, he found his pillow wet
with tears which he had shed against his will or knowledge--tears of
joy, or tears of grief, which were they? He sprang from his bed and
stood before the window of his boxlike room.

"It is my yellow streak again," he muttered, wiping his eyes and
grinding his teeth. "It can't down me awake, and so it coils about me in
dreams. Be a man, John Trott! Life was never made for happiness. It was
for pain, struggle, and conquest."

He heard a sound in Dora's room. He wondered if anything was wrong, and
as an anxious mother might have done, he listened attentively. He heard
a low, rippling lau