"Good and kind and wise," he mused. "If only the child knew! Heigh-ho!
I am kind, sometimes I've been good, and often wise. Well, I can't
disillusion the child, happily; she has given me no address."

He rose, wheeled his chair to a window facing the street, and opened
it. The cool fresh April air rushed in, clearing the room of its
opalescent clouds, cleansing his brain of the fever that beset it. He
leaned with his elbows on the sill and, breathed noisily, gratefully.
Above, heaven had decked her broad bosom with her flickering stars,
and from the million lamps of the great city rose and floated a
tarnished yellow haze. So many sounds go forth to make the voices of
the night: somewhere a child was crying fretfully, across the way the
faint tinkle of a piano, the far-off rattle of the elevated, a muffled
laugh from a window, above, the rat-tat of a cab-horse, the breeze in
the ivy clinging to the walls of the church next door, the quarrelsome
chirp of the sleepy sparrows; and then, recurrence. Only the poet or
the man in pain opens his ears to these sounds.

Over on Broadway a child of his fertile brain was holding the rapt
attention of several hundred men and women; and across the broad land
that night four other dramas were being successfully acted. People
were discussing his theories, denouncing or approving his conception
of life. The struggle was past, his royalties were making him rich.
And here he was this night, drinking the cup of bitterness, of
unhappiness, the astringent draft of things that might and should have
been. The coveted grape was sour, the desired apple was withered.
Those who traverse the road with Folly as boon companion find only
emptiness.

And so it was with Warrington. He had once been good, wholly good and