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But Alice--and in one wave there returned to him the story which he had striven to put out of his heart She had known him in his weakness, but she would never think of hith The whirey autue had heartened his It had been a co the promise of the tryst And she would never know it, would only know that sole with an inborn weakness Well-a-day! It was no world of rounded corners and co, a beginning were found in the scheme of man's frailty He had no clear-cut conception of a future-that was the happy lot of the strong-hearted--but he had a generous intolerance of little success He did not ask rewards, but he prayed for the hope of a good beginning or a gallant failure The odd romance which lies in the wanderer's brain welcoht hair floated di exquisite and dear, a memory, a voice, a note of tenderness in this last exhilaration A sentimental passion was beyond him; he was too critical of folly to worship any lost lady; and he had no love for vain reirl had becoo he had not seen her, now she was home and childhood and friends to hier, but the pain had gone The ineffectual longing which had galled hith

For in this ultimate ar little fears, which, like foxes, gnaw at the roots of the heart, had gone, even the greater perils of faint hope and a halting energy The half-hearted had beco and the siht, his muscles stiff froone: only the wound in his ear, got the day before, had begun to bleed afresh He wiped the blood aith his handkerchief, and laughed at the thought of this little care In a fewa pin-prick

He wondered idly how soon death would colory of the utter loss His bones whitening a on the them with a white sepulchre No man could seek a lordlier burial It was the death he had always craved From murder, fire, and sudden death, why should we call on the Lord to deliver us? A broken neck in a hunting-field, a slip on rocky mountains, a wounded animal at bay--such was the environment of death for which he had ever prayed But this--this was beyond his dreams