This study had become to him the place of his dearest revelations of life. Here, of late especially, he had found refuge from every discord, and here invariably were opened the letters from the Skylark. The place of a man's work becomes a grand, quiet solace as he grows older, but calm and poise were wrested from the room to-day. He fought the depression with every trained faculty, but was whipped by it. Color and sunlight were gone from within; the zeal from future work, the warmth from every promise, the changing lustre from words, and the excellent energy of thought which impels their weaving. Twilight in mid-afternoon. He turned on the lights impatiently. Meaning and beauty were bereft from all his possessions, as buoyancy was gone from his own breast. There was something pitifully boyish in the trophies he had treasured--so much of the college cub, and the youth who refuses to permit his travels to be forgotten. He regarded his past work, as one grown out of it, regretting that it had ever attracted the materials of permanence. Smugness in his teachings; cold intellectuality brazen in all his attainments; everything about him suddenly become sinister from the old life!... He looked into the East--his country of singing, of roses, cedars, and fountains--but the gray-black twilight was a damnable intervention.... It was in this spirit, or lack of it, that he wrote the letter which revealed to Paula his inner responsiveness, as she was tossed in The High Tide. The letter which she had written almost at the same time, reached him on the second morning thereafter; and his suffering in the interval he could only liken to one of the old sieges of reaction after dissipation. The fine, angular writing, which he never regarded without a sense of the darting swiftness of her hand; the thin, tough sheets that crinkled, came like bounty to the starving; yet he was deathly afraid. Something of the long ago has just come to me--to my very rooms. It would not have been believed, had I sought it. I might have endured it, if _you_ had told me. It is dreadful to play with illusions. Oh, why must we keep our gods so far away--lest we lose them? Had I waited longer, I could not have written. It seems now that you have a right to know--before my pride dries up all expression. You are not to blame--except that you were very reckless in adding happinesses one upon the other. It was all quite ridiculous. I trusted my intuition--allowed myself to think of a table spread in the wilderness of the world with you. My intuitions! I used to be so proud of them. I see now that sometimes they're quite as fallible as plain thinking, after all.