s haggard face--that face which would look like
the blessed St. John, and leaned heavily back in his chair.

"'Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I,'" he murmured drowsily, "'it
is some meteor which the sun exhales, to be to thee this night--'"

The words floated off in languid nothingness, and he slept. Dodson arose
preparatory to stretching himself on his couch. But first he bent over
his friend with a sense of tragic appreciation.

"Damned by the skin of his teeth!" he muttered. "A little more, and he
would have gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good fellow. As
it is"--he smiled with his usual conceited delight in his own sayings,
even when they were uttered in soliloquy--"he is merely one of those
splendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell." Then Dodson had a
momentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he soon overcame it, and
stretching himself on his sofa, he, too, slept.

That night he and O'Connor went together to hear "Faust" sung, and
returning to the office, Dodson prepared to write his criticism. Except
for the distant clatter of telegraph instruments, or the peremptory
cries of "copy" from an upper room, the office was still. Dodson wrote
and smoked his interminable cigarettes; O' Connor rested his head in
his hands on the desk, and sat in perfect silence. He did not know when
Dodson finished, or when, arising, and absent-mindedly extinguishing the
lights, he moved to the door with his copy in his hands. Dodson gathered
up the hats and coats as he passed them where they lay on a chair, and
called:

"It is done, Tim. Come, let's get out of this."

There was no answer, and he thought Tim was following, but after he had
handed his criticism to the city editor, he saw he was still alone, and
returned to the room for his friend. He advanced no further than the
doorway, for, as he stood in the dusky corridor and looked within the
darkened room, he saw before his friend a Shape, white, of perfect
loveliness, divinely delicate and pure and ethereal, which seemed as the
embodiment of all goodness. From it came a soft radiance and a perfume
softer than the wind when "it breathes upon a bank of violets stealing
and giving odor." Staring at it, with eyes immovable, sat his friend.

It was strange that at sight of a thing so unspeakably fair, a coldness
like that which comes from the jewel-blue lips of a Muir crevasse
should have fallen upon Dodson, or that it was only by summoning all the
manho