Having no answer ready but a smile, he gave her this pleasantly enough, so that she might take it, if she chose, for a complete agreement.  Though his heart was filled with repressed tenderness, there was nothing further now that he could say to her, for he realised as he looked into her face, that there was little room in her happiness either for his tenderness or for himself.  An aversion, too, to meeting Kemper awoke in him, and so, after a few minutes of trivial conversation, he rose and held out his hand.

“I’m very busy just now, so I may not see you again for quite awhile,” he said at parting, “but remember if ever you should want me that I am always waiting.”

A little later, as he walked up the street in the June sunshine, he saw Kemper’s new automobile spinning rapidly from the direction of Fifth Avenue.

CHAPTER III

THE GREATEST OF THESE

For a minute after Kemper had passed in his car, Adams turned back and stood looking down the long street filled with pleasant June sunshine.  In the distance a hand-organ was grinding out a jerky sentimental air, and beside him, at the corner by which he stood, a crippled vender of fruit had halted his little cart of oranges and apples.

A year ago Adams might have told himself, in the despair of ignorance, that since Laura had given her love to Kemper she was lost to him forever.  But he had learned now that this could not be true—­that she was too closely knit into his destiny to separate herself entirely from it; and there came to him, while he stood there, a strange mystic assurance that she would some day feel that she had need of him again.  His love had passed triumphantly through its first earthly stages, and in the large impassioned yearning with which he thought of her there was, so far as he himself was conscious, but little left of a sharper personal desire.  All desire, indeed, which has its root in the physical craving for possession seemed to have gone out of him in the last few months; and since the earliest dawn of that deeper consciousness within his soul, he had almost ceased to think of himself as an isolated individual life.

To let go the personal was to fall back again on the Eternal; between the soul and God, he had learned in his deepest agony, there is room for nothing more impregnable than the illusion of self.  As Roger Adams—­as a mere separate existence, he was a failure.  The things which he had desired in life he had not possessed; the things which he had possessed he had ceased very soon, in any vital sense, to desire.  Of his life’s work, so big at the beginning, he saw now that he had made but a small achievement—­a volume of essays on the writings of other men and a few years editing of a magazine which had absorbed his strength without yielding him the smallest return of fame.  On every side, from all avenues of hope or of mere impulse, there had crowded upon him, he admitted smiling, but disappointment and disillusion.  He had played for happiness as every man plays for it from the cradle, he had staked his throw as boldly, he had made his resolves as desperately, as any of his fellows, and yet at the end of his forty years he had not a single object to put forward as his reward.  Nothing remained to him!  As the world counts success he could show only failure.