MEANWHILE, many things had happened to Mr. Perrin during this month. On that night after Clinton had told him about Miss Desart's engagement to Traill, he did not go to bed for many hours, but sat over his black grate without moving until the morning. He did not know until this had happened to him how greatly he had valued his dreams. To every man in middle life there comes a day when he sees clearly and pitilessly that he has missed ambitions, or, if he has gained them, that there were other ambitions that would have been more profitable of pursuit; and then, if the rest of his days are to be worthily and honorably spent, he must make reckoning with other things that have perhaps no glitter nor promise, but will give him enough—life has no compensation for cynics. In that black night, the darkest night of his life, Perrin saw that his last claim to that chance to which he had clung from his earliest boyhood, was gone. At first, in the blind pathos of his disappointment, it seemed to him that she had promised to marry him and had left him at the altar. A great wave of self-pity swept over him, and he sat with his head in his hands, and the tears trickled through his thin fingers. The things that he could have done had she been faithful to him!—that was the way he put it. He saw now scenes that had occurred between them. He had pleaded his love, and she had accepted him; her head had rested on his breast, and, in that very room, he had held her and kissed her and stroked her hair. And then, slowly, as the room grew colder and the faint gray dawn came in at the window, he knew that that was not true; she had never cared about him, she had scarcely spoken to him; how could she care for a man like him—that sort of creature? What had God meant by making a man like that? It was His game, perhaps; it pleased Him perhaps to have some ridiculous animal there that other men might sport with it—other beardless boys like Traill.... He felt that he would like to take his revenge on God. He would show God that he was not the kind of man to be played with like that—he would mock at Him and show that he didn't care, that he was not afraid—ah! but he was afraid, terribly afraid. He had always been afraid since those days when, a very small boy in short trousers, he had sat listening to the clergyman who had painted pictures of hell with such lurid and wonderful accuracy. God was like that—He took away from you all the things that made life worth living, and then punished you with eternal fire afterwards because you resented His behavior.