crossed the street again, and once more made his way to the wharf.

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