He lay there in bed with no restlessness; he heard the regular breathing of his wife, who was sleeping at his side; he saw the faint illumination from the door open into the next room where the baby was also asleep. He looked toward the window, but no ray of light was yet visible; and he guessed it to be about four o'clock in the morning, perhaps a little earlier. In that case he had not been in bed more than two or three hours at the most. He wondered why he had waked thus unexpectedly, since he had had a fatiguing day. Perhaps it was the excitement—there was no doubt that he had had his full share of excitement that evening—and he thrilled again as he recalled the delicious sensation of dull dread yielding at last to the certainty of success. He had played for a heavy stake and he had won. That was just what he had been doing—gambling with fate, throwing dice with fortune itself. That was what every dramatic author had to do every time he brought out a new play. The production of a piece at an important New York theatre was a venture as aleatory almost as cutting a pack of cards, and the odds were always against the dramatist. And as the young man quietly recalled the events of the evening it seemed to him that the excitement of those who engineer corners in Wall Street must be like his own anxiety while the future of his drama hung in the balance, only theirs could not but be less keen than his, less poignant, for he was playing his game with men and women, while what they touched were but inanimate stocks. His winning depended upon the actors and actresses who had bodied forth his conception. A single lapse of memory or a single slip of the tongue, and the very sceptical audience of the first night might laugh in the wrong place, and so cut themselves off from sympathy; and all his labor would go for nothing, and all his hopes would shrivel before his eyes. Of a truth it is the ordeal by fire that the dramatist must undergo; and there had been moments that long swift evening when he had felt as though he were tied to the stake, and awaiting only the haggard squaw who was to apply the torch.