But the larger vision was still before him, and he knew that all these thoughts were the cheapest falsehood.  In spite of appearances, in spite of the outward emptiness of his existence, he had not failed; and in the hour that he had put life aside he had for the first time in his whole experience begun really to live.  In surrendering his own small individual being he knew that he had entered into the possession of a being immeasurably larger than his own.

He looked at the fruit vender smiling, and the man’s answering smile came to him like the clasp of fellowship.  “Did he, too, understand?” was Adams’ unspoken question, “had he, also, found the key that unlocked his prison?” and there flowed into his heart something of the rapture with which Laura had cried:  “I’ve grown to the light!” In each exclamation there was ecstasy, but in hers it was the short, troubled ecstasy of the senses, which hears its doom even in the hour of its own fulfilment; while from his finer joy there shone forth that radiant energy, in which is both warmth and light, both rest and action, which illumines not only the soul within, but transfigures and refines the mere dull ordinary facts of life.

As he stood there the car passed him again, and Laura and Kemper both turned, smiling, to look back at him.  When Laura’s long white veil was lost, with a last flutter, in the sunshine, he nodded to the fruit vender, and crossing to Broadway started in the direction of his home.

He had asked Trent to dine with him—­the boy looked fagged he thought, and it might do him good to talk freely about his play.  Then he recalled several letters that he had put aside for the sake of seeing Laura; and retracing his steps, he went back to his office and sat down before his desk.  It surprised him sometimes to find how little irksome such uninteresting details had become.

They talked late over their cigars and coffee, and when at last Trent rose, with a laughing reminder of his mother, and went out into the hall to put on his overcoat, Adams passed by him, after a final handshake, and entered his darkened study at the end of the hall.  He heard the door close quickly as Trent left the house, and his mind was still full of the boy’s dramatic ambitions, as he paused beside his desk and bent down to raise the wick of the green lamp.  He had fallen into the habit of sitting up rather late now, and there was a paper on his blotting-pad which he was preparing for the coming issue of his magazine.  After glancing hastily over, he found that the last few sentences were rearranging themselves in his thoughts, and he had set himself patiently to the redraughting of the paragraph, when a slight sound at the door caused him to look up suddenly with the suspended blue pencil still, in his hand.  It was too late for the maids, he knew—­they had already gone to bed before Trent left—­and he knew also that the person who entered at this hour must have opened the outer door by means of a latch-key.  The soft, slow movement outside sent a nervous shiver through him; he was aware the next instant that he gripped the pencil more closely in his hand; and then, rising to his feet with a breathless impulse to be face to face at once with the inevitable moment, he made a single step forward, while he watched the knob turn, the door open slowly, and Connie cross the threshold and pause confusedly as if blinded by the lamplight.