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The harsh reality of the outside world was like the hard-driven, acrid spray of the ocean in a wintry storrateful, sternto fall, and the avenues were filled with the furious claor of the overhead trains--almost incessant at this hour--benu with the hideous clatter of drays and express-carts, each driver, eachin a kind of sullen frenzy to reach his barn before six o'clock, while truculent pedestrians, tired, eager, and exacting, trod upon one another's heels in their ho life seemed at the moment not merely normal but wholesome and admirable by force of contrast with the h which he had just passed Better to be a burly, unreflecting truck soul like Anthony Clarke, "Yes, and better for Viola Lambert to be the wife of one of these rude ani a life of physical hardship, than to continue the sport of alost the true values out of his own life, is re those of the woman he professes to love"

His mind then went back, by the same law of contrast, to histrail "To think on how ss! Had I taken 'the cut-off,' as -cabin at the head of the cañon, or had I saddled up the nextand ridden over to Silver City, as I had planned, ould never have met; and I would not now be involved in her hysterical career"

But he had done neither of these things He had ca lay soment of his youth and her beauty She had held hie day by day, because she was lithe of body and fair of face and because her eyes were unaccountably wistful Yes, he had sought her that night when the river sang with joyous, ione to her for diversion--that he now acknowledged--and he had grown each day more deeply concerned with her life and its burdens

And now here she was at his door,than ever, involved in a snare of h some hidden affinity of their natures as no wo so powerfully, so insistently, that to save her froible, seemed the one and only task at his hand