med so inspiringly his own, there
was a larger relation to greater interests, a wider field, a greater
sense of security, and a sense of justice in the change; he felt that he
had much to learn. There was something in him that could not profit
where other men profited--that could not take advantage when that
advantage meant loss to another. He was not great enough alone to
reconcile the narrowing factors of trade with that warring law within
him. The stumbling of Cater would have been another stumbling-block if
it had not been that one. That for which Leverich, with Martin always
behind him, had chosen Justin first, had been the very thing that had
fought against them.

The summer was far spent. Justin had been working hard. It was long
after midnight. Lois slept, but Justin could not; he rose and went into
the adjoining room, and sat down by her open window. The night had been
very close, but now a faint breath stirred from somewhere out of the
darkness. It was just before the dawn. Justin looked out into a gloom in
which the darkness of trees wavered uncertainly and brought with it a
vague remembrance. He had done all this before. When? Suddenly he
recollected the night he had sat at this same window, at the beginning
of this terrible journey; and his thoughts and feelings then, his deep
loneliness of soul, the prevision of the pain even of fulfilment--an
endless, endless arid waste, with the welling forth of that black spirit
of evil in his own nature, as the only vital thing to bear him secret
company--a moment that was wolfish to his better nature. Almost with the
remembrance came the same mood, but only as reflected in the surface of
his saner nature, not arising from it.

As he gazed, wrapped in self-communing, on the vague formlessness of the
night, it began gradually to dissolve mysteriously, and the outlines of
the trees and the surrounding objects melted into view. A bird sang from
somewhere near by, a heavenly, clear, full-throated call that brought a
shaft of light from across the world, broadening, as the eye leaped to
it, into a great and spreading glory of flame.

It had rained just before; the drops still hung on bush and tree; and as
the dazzling radiance of the sun touched them, every drop also radiated
light, prismatic, and scintillating an almost audibly tinkling joy. So
indescribably wonderful and beautiful, yet so tender, seemed this
scene--as of a mighty light informing the least atom of this t