He had hoped, a year ago, to find, in the excitement of a new life in Chicago, healing for the desperate hurts of love. If only he had gone then!... But he hadn’t had the money to buy a railway ticket. He had taken this job on the Record, and settled down to life in Port Royal again as a reporter. His twenty-first year had gone by. The hurts of love, so intolerably hard to bear, had healed. After all, Joyce Tennant had loved him; nothing could ever take away his memories of those starlit evenings on the river, and in the little cabin on their lonely island. She had loved him, she had been his. There was comfort in that thought.... The hurts of love had healed. But the hurts of pride remained. Loving him, she had chosen to marry another. That wound still ached.... She had seen him all along for what he was—a moonstruck dreamer! She had thought him the fit companion of a reckless love-adventure—that was all. Her scorn, or what seemed to him her scorn, mirrored and magnified by the secret consciousness of his own weakness, came to assume in his mind the proportions of a final and universal judgment. A dreamer? And a dreamer only? His egotism could not endure the thought. The shadow-world of ideas, of theories, of poetic fancies, amidst which he had moved all his life, was not enough. He must live in the real world. Chicago became for him the symbol of that real world. It was no longer a place of refuge—it was a test, a challenge. He would go there not as a moonstruck dreamer, but as a realist, able to face the hard facts of life. He would become a different person. He was tired of being Felix Fay the fool, the poet, the theorist. He would rather be anybody else in the world than that Felix Fay whose ridiculous blunderings he knew by heart. He could imagine himself in Chicago, a changed person—a young man of action, practical, alert, ruthlessly competitive.... Dreaming of success in Chicago, he sat idly at his desk in Port Royal. 3 It was late in the afternoon. No one was left in the office but himself and Hastings, the city editor. “Fay!” He looked up. The city editor beckoned him over. “Look at this.” Hastings held in his hand the sheaf of items from Wheaton, over which Felix had casually written a heading half an hour before. Felix held out his hand and took them. Something was wrong. He looked anxiously at the items, written in grey pencil on coarse paper in a straggling hand. The page uppermost was numbered “3.” He had hardly glanced at it. Evidently he had overlooked something. It caught his eye instantly—the second item from the top: