“I came, because I thought I could help,” she said. “I thought it would help us both.” “Are you troubled? You'd better let it go. It's the end of that story. I've fought it out now. I'm free of it.” “What do you mean?” They stared closely in the dusk into each other's eyes. Then she dropped her head, and wept with her face in her hands. “It's not your story,” said Aidee. “Yes, it is! It's mine!” Then she raised her head, and he saw her wet eyes glisten in the dimness, and she said: “Teach me what it means.” And a dull shock went through him threaded by a sharp pain, a sensation so penetrating as to resemble pain, and desirable enough to be called happiness, and yet not like any pain or happiness in the remembered stretch of his concentrated and brooding life. That life, as he looked back on it, he saw starting from the old farmhouse on the plain, with its fallen fences and dry fields, the tired face of his mother in the house door, the small impish face of “Lolly” by his side. Next followed the big brick schoolhouse in the village, the schoolroom that he disliked, the books that he loved, the smoky chimney of his lamp, the pine table and the room where he studied; from which he would have to go presently down into the street and drag Lolly out of some raging battle with other boys, struggling and cursing, up to their room, where Lolly would turn on him in a moment with queer, twisted, affectionate smile, and clinging arms--“I ain't mad now, Al.” Then he saw the press-room in St. Louis, he saw Lolly imprisoned and then suddenly gone. He saw the mines and the crumbling mountain slopes in Nevada, the sheds, the dump cart, the spot where he had poured out first his long pent-up dreams to a rugged, astonished audience, and where that new passion of speech had come to him, that had seemed to fill the craving void in his heart; the spot where he had met the circuit-riding bishop and T. M. Secor. Then came his early success in Port Argent and the organisation of the Assembly; then the attack on Wood, and the growing sense of futility, in that while many listened and praised, little happened and little came of their listening or approval. “They take me for an actor, and the Assembly for a comedy,” he had thought bitterly, and he had written “The Inner Republic,” and the book that had brought to him Camilla Champney, eager and pureeyed, and asking, “What does it mean? It is my story too!”