found, and clutched eagerly enough. They were gone now, all of
them. The man sat down on the cinder-road, looking up into the
murky sky.

"'T be late, Hugh. Wunnot hur come?"

He shook his head doggedly, and the woman crouched out of his
sight against the wall. Do you remember rare moments when a
sudden light flashed over yourself, your world, God? when you
stood on a mountain-peak, seeing your life as it might have
been, as it is? one quick instant, when custom lost its force
and every-day usage? when your friend, wife, brother, stood in
a new light? your soul was bared, and the grave,--a foretaste
of the nakedness of the Judgment-Day? So it came before him,
his life, that night. The slow tides of pain he had borne
gathered themselves up and surged against his soul. His squalid
daily life, the brutal coarseness eating into his brain, as the
ashes into his skin: before, these things had been a dull
aching into his consciousness; to-night, they were reality. He
griped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiff with soot, about
him, and tore it savagely from his arm. The flesh beneath was
muddy with grease and ashes,--and the heart beneath that! And
the soul? God knows.

Then flashed before his vivid poetic sense the man who had left
him,--the pure face, the delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with
all he knew of beauty or truth. In his cloudy fancy he had
pictured a Something like this. He had found it in this
Mitchell, even when he idly scoffed at his pain: a Man all-
knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning,--the keen