"Is it possible that what was so difficult yesterday should have grown so easy to-day?" he asked himself, astonished. "Why have I never seen so clearly before? Why, until this evening, have I gone puling about my life as if such things as disgrace and poverty were sufficient to crush the strength out of a man? Let me put forth all my courage and nothing is impossible--not even the attainment of success nor the punishment of Fletcher. It is only necessary to begin at once--to hasten about one's task--and in a few short years it will be accomplished and done with. All will be as I wish, and I shall then be as happy as Tucker." Following this came the questions, How? When? Where shall I begin?--but he put them angrily aside and refilled his glass. A great good-humour possessed him, and, as he drank, all the unpleasant things of life--loss, unrest, heavy labour--vanished in the roseate glow that pervaded his thoughts. What came of it was not quite clear to him next day, and this caused the uneasiness that lasted for a week. He had a vague recollection that Tom Spade took the boy home and rolled him through the window, and that he himself went whistling to his bed with the glorious sensation that he was riding the crest of a big wave. With the morning came a severe headache and the ineffectual effort to remember just how far it had all gone, and then a sharp anxiety, which vanished when he saw Will pass on his way to school. "The boy was none the worse for it," Tom Spade told him later; "he had a drop too much, to be sure, but his legs were as steady as mine, an' he slept it off in an hour. He's a ticklish chap, Mr. Christopher," the storekeeper added after a moment, "an' I'd keep my hands from meddlin' with him, if I was you. That thing shan't happen agin at my place, an' it wouldn't have happened then if I'd been around at the beginnin'. You may tamper with yo' own salvation as much as you please--that's my gospel, but I'll be hanged if you've got a right to tamper with anybody else's." Christopher wheeled suddenly about and gave him a keen glance from under his lowered eyelids. For the first time he detected a lack of deference in Tom Spade's tone, and a suspicion shot through him that the words were meant to veil a reprimand.