"If she accepts me, I'll make it impossible for her not to be happy," he said to himself, in all the fine unselfishness of passion--not divine unselfishness but human--not the kind we read about and pretend to have--and get a savage attack of bruised vanity if we are accused of not having it--no, but just the kind we have and show in our daily lives--the unselfishness of longing to make happy those whom it would make us happier to see happy. "She may think she cares for this young clerk--" so ran his thoughts--"but she doesn't know her own mind. When she is mine, I'll take her in hand as a gardener does a delicate rare flower--and, by Heaven, how I shall make her blossom and bloom!" It would hardly be possible for a human being to pass a stormier night than was that night of his. Alternations between hope and despair--fantastic pictures of future with and without her, wild pleadings with her--those delirious transports to which our imaginations give way if we happen to be blessed and cursed with imaginations--in the security of the darkness and aloneness of night and bed. And through it all he was tormented body and soul by her loveliness--her hair, her skin, her eyes, the shy, slender graces of her form--He tossed about until his bed was so wildly disheveled that he had to rise and remake it. When day came and the first mail, there was her letter on the salver of the boy entering the room. He reached for it with eager, trembling arm, drew back. "Put it on the table," he said. The boy left. He was alone. Leaning upon his elbow in the bed he stared at the letter with hollow, terrified eyes. It contained his destiny. If she accepted, he would go up, for his soul sickness would be cured. If she refused, he would cease to struggle. He rose, took from a locked drawer a bottle of rye whisky. He poured a tall glass--the kind called a bar glass--half full, drank it straight down without a pause or a quiver. The shock brought him up standing. He looked and acted like his former self as he went to the table, took the letter, opened it, and read: "I am willing to marry you, if you really want me. I am so tired of struggling, and I don't see anything but dark ahead.--D. H." Norman struggled over to the bed, threw himself down, flat upon his back, arms and legs extended wide and whole body relaxed. He felt the blood whirl up into his brain like the great red and black tongues of flame and smoke in a conflagration, and then he slept soundly until nearly one o'clock.