“In a moment. She loves me, Phil. She is waiting for me in her little house among the hills. I left her only this morning, and soon I shall go back and leave New York forever. I can write the story up there—the story I have dreamed of writing—for I shall always have the secret of it. I have but to shut my eyes and tell what I see; and it is because she loves me. All the life of all the past—I can call that ‘A Story of the Road.’ Then there will be the future to write of—the men and women that are to come; for we shall have children, Phil, and in them——” “You’re making rapid progress,” ejaculated Philander. “——I shall know the story of the future. Even now I know it; I do not simply foresee it, I see it. Why not ‘A Story of the Goal!’ For I belong to it—do you not understand? Yet, after all, what is that compared with the present? It shall be ‘A Story of the March!’ Look there!” He threw his eyes up to the ceiling, which was brightened for an instant by the headlight of an elevated train as it rushed past. “Do you know what that engineer was really thinking of as he went by? That would be story enough. Or what was in the heart of the bride to-night, down on the third landing—you smelled the orange-flowers as you came up? To feel that your heart is in them, and theirs in you——” But Philander Atkinson was not listening to the lover’s rhapsody. He was thinking of a certain summer when he, too, had had strange fancies in his head; when his thoughts played backward and forward with swift certainty; when he had grown suddenly conscious of great desires and deep affinities, and for a space of some three months he had dreamed of being something more than a mere verse-maker, a master of the file. Then—whether it was that she grew tired of him, or they both realized that some dull mistake had been made—it was all over. There was still in his drawer a package of manuscript he had written that summer; in blank verse, none too noble a form for the high thoughts which then filled him; in a queer new rhythm, too, the secret of whose beat he had caught at and then lost, for the lines read harshly to him now. He looked these things over occasionally, as a sort of awful example of himself to himself; though he had gone so far as to borrow some of their imagery, not without a certain shame, to adorn his light verse. His card-house had fallen, but some of the colored pasteboard was pretty enough to be used again. Curiously, he found that he could cut pasteboard into more ingenious shapes than ever since his brief experience in piling it; fancy served him better after imagination left him; his triolets were admirably turned, and his luck with the magazines began. Altogether it had been an odd experience; half those crazy ideas of Darnel had been his two years before, but he was quite over them—yes, quite—and now it was D.’s turn. He listened again to something that Darnel was murmuring.