ingredient in the success-portion, he went easily into the first councils of the community.  Joylessly painstaking and exact, he still prospered in what simple practice of the law there offered, acting as counsel for the railway, defending a rare criminal case, collecting accounts, carrying on title contests and “adverse” suits in the many cases before the Register of the Land Office, and performing all the simple humdrum of the busy country lawyer.  He made more and more money, since at that time one of his position and opportunities could hardly avoid doing so.  His place in the business world was assured.  He had no occasion for concern.

For most men this would have been prosperity sufficient; yet never did Edward Franklin lie down with the long breath of the man content; and ever in his dreams there came the vague beckoning of a hand still half unseen.  Once this disturbing summons to his life was merely disquieting and unformulated, but gradually now it assumed a shape more urgent and more definite.  Haunting him with the sense of the unfulfilled, the face of Mary Ellen was ever in the shadow; of Mary Ellen, who had sent him away forever; of Mary Ellen, who was wasting her life on a prairie ranch, with naught to inspire and none to witness the flowering of her soul.  That this rare plant should thus fail and wither seemed to him a crime quite outside his own personal concern.  This unreal Mary Ellen, this daily phantom, which hung faces on bare walls and put words between the lines of law books, seemed to have some message for him.  Yet had he not had his final message from the actual Mary Ellen?  And, after all, did anything really matter any more?

So much for the half-morbid frame of mind due for the most part to the reflex of a body made sick by an irregular and irrational life.  This much, too, Franklin could have established of his own philosophy.  Yet this was not all, nor was the total so easily to be explained away.

Steadily, and with an insistence somewhat horrible, there came to Franklin’s mind a feeling that this career which he saw before him would not always serve to satisfy him.  Losing no touch of the democratic loyalty to his fellow-men, he none the less clearly saw himself in certain ways becoming inexorably separated from his average fellow-man.  The executive instinct was still as strong within him, but he felt it more creative, and he longed for finer material than the seamy side of man’s petty strifes with man, made possible under those artificial laws which marked man’s compromise with Nature.  He found no solace and no science in the study of the great or the small crimes of an artificial system which did not touch individual humanity, and which was careless of humanity’s joys or sorrowings.  Longing for the satisfying, for the noble things, he found himself irresistibly facing toward the past, and irresistibly convinced that in that past, as in the swiftly marching present, there might be some lesson,