The wind and rain had increased, but he no longer heeded them in his feverish haste and his consciousness that motion could alone keep away that dreadful apathy which threatened to overcloud his judgment.  And he wished while he was able to reason logically to make up his mind to end this unsupportable situation that night.  He was scarcely twenty, yet it seemed to him that it had already been demonstrated that his life was a failure; he was an orphan, and when he left college to seek his own fortune in California, he believed he had staked his all upon that venture—­and lost.

That bitterness which is the sudden recoil of boyish enthusiasm, and is none the less terrible for being without experience to justify it,—­that melancholy we are too apt to look back upon with cynical jeers and laughter in middle age,—­is more potent than we dare to think, and it was in no mere pose of youthful pessimism that Randolph Trent now contemplated suicide.  Such scraps of philosophy as his education had given him pointed to that one conclusion.  And it was the only refuge that pride—­real or false—­offered him from the one supreme terror of youth—­shame.

The street was deserted, and the few lights he had previously noted in warehouses and shops were extinguished.  It had grown darker with the storm; the incongruous buildings on either side had become misshapen shadows; the long perspective of the wharf was a strange gloom from which the spars of a ship stood out like the cross he remembered as a boy to have once seen in a picture of the tempest-smitten Calvary.  It was his only fancy connected with the future—­it might have been his last, for suddenly one of the planks of the rotten wharf gave way beneath his feet, and he felt himself violently precipitated toward the gurgling and oozing tide below.  He threw out his arms desperately, caught at a strong girder, drew himself up with the energy of desperation, and staggered to his feet again, safe—­and sane.  For with this terrible automatic struggle to avoid that death he was courting came a flash of reason.  If he had resolutely thrown himself from the pier head as he intended, would he have undergone a hopeless revulsion like this?  Was he sure that this might not be, after all, the terrible penalty of self-destruction—­this inevitable fierce protest of mind and body when too late?  He was momentarily touched with a sense of gratitude at his escape, but his reason told him it was not from his accident, but from his intention.

He was trying carefully to retrace his steps, but as he did so he saw the figure of a man dimly lurching toward him out of the darkness of the wharf and the crossed yards of the ship.  A gleam of hope came over him, for the emotion of the last few minutes had rudely displaced his pride and self-love.  He would appeal to this stranger, whoever he was; there was more chance that in this rude locality he would be a belated sailor or some humbler wayfarer, and