vified. The blighting of his love for her had been
no more bitter, perhaps less so, than the realization which she had
compelled in him of her lightness and unworthiness. Still, he had wanted
her, longed for her, hoped for her. Now that hope was gone. There seemed
nothing left to work for, no adequate good beyond the striving. He
looked with dulled vision out upon blank days. With a sudden weakening
of fiber he turned into a hotel and telephoned McGuire Ellis that he
wouldn't be at the office that evening. To the other's anxious query was
he ill, he replied that he was tired out and was going home to bed.

Meantime, far across the map at a famous Florida hostelry, the Great
American Pumess, in the first flush and pride of her engagement which
all commentators agree upon as characteristic of maidenhood's vital
resolution, lay curled up in a little fluffy coil of misery and tears,
repeating between sobs, "I hate him! I _hate_ him!" Meaning her
_fiance_, Mr. William Douglas, with whom her mind and emotions should
properly have been concerned? Not so, perspicacious reader. Meaning Mr.
Harrington Surtaine.

Upon _his_ small portion of the map, that gentleman wooed sleep in vain
for hours. Presently he arose from his tossed bed, dressed quietly,
slipped out of the big door and walked with long, swinging steps down to
the "Clarion" Building. There it stood, a plexus of energies, in the
midst of darkness and sleep. Eye-like, its windows peered vigilantly out
into the city. A door opened to emit a voice that bawled across the way
some profane demand for haste in the delivery of "that grub"; and
through the shaft of light Hal could see brisk figures moving, and hear
the roar and thrill of the press sealing its irrevocable message.

Again he felt, with a pride so profound that its roots struck down into
the depths of humility, his own responsibility to all that straining
life and energy and endeavor. He, the small atom, alone in the night,
_was_ the "Clarion." Those men, the fighting fellowship of the office,
were rushing and toiling and coordinating their powers to carry out some
ideal still dimly inchoate in his brain. What mattered his little pangs?
There was a man's test to meet, and the man within him stretched
spiritual muscles for the trial.

"If I could only be sure what's right," he said within himself, voicing
the doubt of every high-minded adventurer upon unbeaten paths. Sharply,
and, as it seemed to him, incongruous