After this there had come a blank of a few weeks—­a blank of which he remembered nothing except that he had struggled like an entrapped beast against his fate—­against his fruitless labour, his sacrificed ambition, the unavailing bitterness of his self-denial—­against the world, destiny, life, death, God!  But the very intensity of his rebellion had brought reaction, and it was in the succeeding apathy of spirit that he had packed his few belongings and started for the Colorado country.  Behind him he was leaving all that made life endurable in his eyes, and yet he was leaving it from some half animal instinct which caused him to preserve the mere naked strip of existence that he no longer valued.  He hated himself for going, yet he went that he might hate himself the more bitterly with each step of the journey.

The lamp on his desk flared up fitfully and as he turned to lower the wick his eyes fell on Connie’s picture.  The uplifted babyish face came back to him as he had first seen it under floating cherry-colored ribbons, and his anger of the last half-hour melted and vanished utterly away.  For the sake of those few months, when the waning fire within him had leaped despairingly toward the flame of life, he knew that he could never quite put Connie from his heart—­for the sake of his short romance and for the sake, too, of his child that had lived three hours.  The thin, heavily veined hand on the arm of his chair quivered for an instant, and he felt his pulses throb quickly as if from acute physical pain.  From the pitiable failure of his marriage, from his loneliness and disillusionment there came back to him the three hours when he had looked upon the face of his living child—­the hours of his profoundest emotion, his completest reconciliation.  He had never regarded himself as an emotionally religious man, yet ten years ago, on the night that his boy died, he had felt that an immortal and indissoluble part of himself had gone out into the void.  For the first time he had come to the deeper reality of life—­through the flowing of the agonised longing within himself toward that permanent universal consciousness of which all human longings are but detached and wandering forms.  From that time death had held for him a more personal promise; and the obligation to live, to fulfil one’s present opportunities, had become charged with another meaning than he had been used to read into what he called his mere animal responsibility.  The boy who had died was for him in a close, an intimate relation, still vitally alive; and with one of those quaint yet pathetic blendings of memory with imagination the little undeveloped soul had blossomed, not invisibly, incommunicably, but into actual daily companionship with his thoughts.