And with a feeling that he was stifling in the over-heated flower-scented rooms, he went quickly from the house into the street.

There was no reason why the news of Laura should disquiet him—­by no possible twist of his imagination could he bring the event of her marriage into any direct bearing on his own life, yet as he walked at his rapid, nervous pace toward his home in Thirty-fifth Street, he felt a burning sore like a great jagged wound in his breast.  That merely human part of him, which was mixed so vitally into the intellectual fervour of his love, suffered from the loss almost as if it had been some fresh physical hurt.  Was it possible that his avowal of renunciation had sought to keep back some particular treasure? some darling frailty?  Or was his suffering at the moment but the first involuntary quiver of the nerves which would pass presently leaving him at one with his fate again?  “Was I content to give her up only so long as she belonged to no other man?” he asked.  “Could I have relinquished her friendship so easily had I known that her love was not for me, but for Kemper?” Again the image of Kemper appeared to him, genial, impulsive, sensual—­and he felt that if it had been another and a different man, he could have borne the loss of Laura with a finer courage.

Then the unworthiness of his mental attitude forced itself upon his reflections, and he realised that with his first return to his old state of selfish blindness, the illumination that had shone in his soul was gradually obscured.  Could it happen to him that he should again lose the light?  Again walk in darkness?  His thoughts were no longer clear with that crystalline clearness of the day before, and it seemed to him suddenly that the key to all wisdom, which he had found so lately, had failed at the critical moment to unlock the fortified doors.  That temporary and purely human reaction, which is the inevitable fleeting shadow cast on the mind by any spiritual irradiation, appeared in his present mood to contain within itself the ultimate abyss of failure.  The single instant when he lost hold on God stretched itself into an eternity of nothingness through his soul.

He had walked rapidly and far, and looking up at his first almost automatic stop, he found that he had not only passed by his own house, but that he had come as far down as the corner of Twentieth Street and Broadway.  The afternoon had waned before he knew it, and the streets were now filled with people returning from their day’s work in offices or in shops.  On one side a newsboy was offering him the evening papers, and on the other a man had thrust a bunch of half-faded violets into his face.