after the fashion of his race, and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by—­that was the indulgent summary of his career thus far.  He had been a brilliant student in the old university and, in a desultory way, he was yet.  He had worried his professor of metaphysics by puzzling questions and keen argument until that philosopher was glad to mark him highest in his class and let him go.  He surprised the old lawyers when it came to a discussion of the pure theory of law, and, on the one occasion when his mother’s pastor came to see him, he disturbed that good man no little, and closed his lips against further censure of him in pulpit or in private.  So that all that was said against him by the pious was that he did not go to church as he should; and by the thoughtful, that he was making a shameful waste of the talents that the Almighty had showered so freely down upon him.  And so without suffering greatly in public estimation, in spite of the fact that the ideals of Southern life were changing fast, he passed into the old-young period that is the critical time in the lives of men like him—­when he thought he had drunk his cup to the dregs; had run the gamut of human experience; that nothing was left to his future but the dull repetition of his past.  Only those who knew him best had not given up hope of him, nor had he really given up hope of himself as fully as he thought.  The truth was, he never fell far, nor for long, and he always rose with the old purpose the same, even if it stirred him each time with less and less enthusiasm—­and always with the beacon-light of one star shining from his past, even though each time it shone a little more dimly.  For usually, of course, there is the hand of a woman on the lever that prizes such a man’s life upward, and when Judith Page’s clasp loosened on Crittenden, the castle that the lightest touch of her finger raised in his imagination—­that he, doubtless, would have reared for her and for him, in fact, fell in quite hopeless ruins, and no similar shape was ever framed for him above its ashes.

It was the simplest and oldest of stories between the two—­a story that began, doubtless, with the beginning, and will never end as long as two men and one woman, or two women and one man are left on earth—­the story of the love of one who loves another.  Only, to the sufferers the tragedy is always as fresh as a knife-cut, and forever new.

Judith cared for nobody.  Crittenden laughed and pleaded, stormed, sulked, and upbraided, and was devoted and indifferent for years—­like the wilful, passionate youngster that he was—­until Judith did love another—­what other, Crittenden never knew.  And then he really believed that he must, as she had told him so often, conquer his love for her.  And he did, at a fearful cost to the best that was in him—­foolishly, but consciously, deliberately.  When the reaction came, he tried to reestablish his relations to a world that held no Judith Page.  Her absence gave him help,