too.

Anne's letter to Simmy was a long one, and she closed it with the
sentence: "You may expect me not later than the twentieth of September."

* * * * *

Thorpe grew thin and haggard as the summer wore away; his nerves were in
such a state that he seriously considered giving up his work, for the time
being, at least. The truth was gradually being forced in upon him that his
hand was no longer as certain, no longer as steady as it had been. Only by
exercising the greatest effort of the will was he able to perform the
delicate work he undertook to do in the hospitals. He was gravely alarmed
by the ever-growing conviction that he was never sure of himself. Not that
he had lost confidence in his ability, but he was acutely conscious of
having lost interest. He was fighting all the time, but it was his own
fight and not that of others. Day and night he was fighting something that
would not fight back, and yet was relentless; something that was content
to sit back in its own power and watch him waste his strength and
endurance. Each succeeding hour saw him grow weaker under the strain. He
was fighting the thing that never surrenders, never weakens, never dies.
He was struggling against a mighty, world-old Giant, born the day that
God's first man was created, and destined to live with all God's men from
that time forth: Passion.

Time and again he went far out of his way to pass by the house near
Washington Square, admittedly surreptitious in his movements. On hot
nights he rode down Fifth Avenue on the top of the stages, and always cast
an eye to the right in passing the street in which Anne lived, looking in
vain for lights in the windows of the closed house. And an hundred times a
day he thought of the key that no longer kept company with others at the
end of a chain but lay loose in his trousers' pocket. Times there were
when an almost irresistible desire came upon him to go down there late at
night and enter the house, risking discovery by the servants who remained
in quarters, just for a glimpse of the rooms upstairs she had
described,--her own rooms,--the rooms in which she dreamed of him.

He affected the society of George and Lutie, spending a great deal of his
leisure with them, scorning himself the while for the perfectly obvious
reason that moved him. Automobile jaunts into the country were not
infrequent. He took them out to the country inns for dinner, to places
along the New