ter least of all. The utmost he could ask for her was that she
should marry, go away, and school herself as nearly as might be to
renounce him. That she should do it utterly would not be possible; but
something would be accomplished if pride or humiliation or resentment
gave her the spirit to carry her head high and ignore his existence.

It was incredible to think that at that very instant she was sleeping
quietly, without a suspicion of what was awaiting her. Everything was
incredible--incredible and impossible. As he looked around the room, in
which every book, every photograph, every pen and pencil, was a part of
him, he found himself once more straining for a hope, catching at
straws. He took a sheet of paper, and sitting down at his desk began
again, for the ten thousandth time, to balance feverishly his meagre
assets against his overwhelming liabilities. He added and subtracted and
multiplied and divided with a sort of frenzy, as though by dint of sheer
forcing the figures he could make them respond to his will.

Suddenly, with a gesture of mingled anger and hopelessness, he swept the
scribbled sheets and all the writing paraphernalia with a crash to the
floor, and, burying his face in his hands, gave utterance to a smothered
groan. It was a cry, not of surrender, but of protest--of infinite,
exasperated protest, of protest against fate and law and judgment and
the eternal principles of right and wrong, and against himself most of
all. With his head pressed down on the bare polished wood of his desk,
he hurled himself mentally at an earth of adamant and a heaven of brass,
hurled himself ferociously, repeatedly, with a kind of doggedness, as
though he would either break them down or dash his own soul to pieces.

"O God! O God!"

It was an involuntary moan, stifled in his fear of becoming hysterical,
but its syllables arrested his attention. They were the syllables of
primal articulation, of primal need, condensing the appeal and the
aspiration of the world. He repeated them:

"O God! O God!"

He repeated them again. He raised his head, as if listening to a voice.

"O God! O God!"

He continued to sit thus, as if listening.

It was a strange, an astounding thought to him that he might pray.
Though the earth of adamant were unyielding, the heaven of brass might
give way!

He dragged himself to his feet.

He believed in God--vaguely. That is, it had always been a matter of
good form with him to go to chu