elt in this man had been untrue, but recent
events and the first shattering reverse that life brought him proved
sufficient to sour his very soul and eclipse a sun which aforetime shone
with great geniality because unclouded. Fate hits such men particularly
hard when her delayed blow falls. Existences long attuned to success and
level fortune; lives which have passed through five-and-thirty years of
their allotted span without much sorrow, without sharp thorns in the
flesh, without those carking, gnawing trials of mind and body which Time
stores up for all humanity--such feel disaster when it does reach them
with a bitterness unknown by those who have been in misery's school from
youth. Poverty does not bite the poor as it bites him who has known
riches and afterwards fights destitution; feeble physical circumstances
do not crush the congenital invalid, but they often come near to break
the heart of a man who, until their black advent, has known nothing but
rude health; great reverses in the vital issues of life and fortune fail
to obliterate one who knows their faces of old, but the first enemy's
cannon on Time's road must ever bring ugly shock to him who has advanced
far and happily without meeting any such thing.

Grimbal's existence had been of a rough-and-ready sort shone over by
success. Philosophy he lacked, for life had never turned his mind that
way; religion was likewise absent from him; and his recent tremendous
disappointment thus thundered upon a mind devoid of any machinery to
resist it. The possession of Phoebe Lyddon had come to be an accepted
and accomplished fact; he chose her for his own, to share the good
things Fortune had showered into his lap--to share them and be a
crowning glory of them. The overthrow of this scheme at the moment of
realisation upset his estimate of life in general and set him adrift and
rudderless, in the hurricane of his first great reverse. Of selfish
temperament, and doubly so by the accident of consistent success, the
wintry wind of this calamity slew and then swept John Grimbal's common
sense before it, like a dead leaf. All that was worst in him rose to the
top upon his trouble, and since Will's marriage the bad had been winning
on the good and thrusting it deeper and deeper out of sight or immediate
possibility of recovery. At all times John Grimbal's inferior
characteristics were most prominently displayed, and superficial
students of character usually rated him lower th