The message was dated at two P. M. Both chill and burning were in the words. It was strangely unlike her; yet in passing through the operator's mind, it might have become routine. The word "kind" was a torturing curb. It placed him on ugly quaking ground. How weak, how ancient and commonplace, is the human lord after all, when in doubt regarding his lady's reception of him! Where is his valor now, his taking of cities, his smiling deaths for honor? Most of all times, he is man, the male; not man, the soul. Half-way out on the surface-car, he discovered one of the big "Selma Cross" bill-boards. It was intimate, startling, an evil omen--great black letters out of the deathless past.... He stood on the fourth floor of the _Zoroaster_. The elevator-man had shown him a certain door which was slightly ajar. He was ill, breathless, and his heart sank strangely with the lights in the shaft from the descending car.... He tapped on the designated door, and a deep melodious voice, instantly identified with ancient abandonments, called gently: "Come in!" FIFTEENTH CHAPTER QUENTIN CHARTER AND SELMA CROSS JOIN ISSUE ON A NEW BATTLE-GROUND, EACH LEAVING THE FIELD WITH OPEN WOUNDS Charter was seized with vertigo. It was his sorry thought that the old scar-tissues, however bravely they sufficed in the days of easy-going, could not endure a crux like this. But he was wrong. It was the shock to his spirit, which made of Selma Cross a giantess of vague outlines in a room filled with swimming objects. Need for the woman of his visions had culminated in the outer hall. In the substitution there was an inner wrench, which to one of Charter's intense concentration was like a stroke; and then, too, the horrible outburst of energy in adjusting the Skylark spirit to the eminent flesh of this old plaything of his, left him drained. He steadied himself into the music-room, and sank into a deep chair, where his heart pumped furiously, but light and empty, as if it could not grip the blood locked in his veins.