"The editors had a perfect right to return my story, even if it is every whit as worthy of publication, even worthier, than anything which has appeared in their magazine for a twelvemonth," he told himself. He realized that he was not dependent upon the public concerning the merit of his work--he could not be until the work appeared in print--but he was combating the opinions (or appealing to them) of a few men whose critical abilities might be biassed by a thousand personal matters with which he could not interfere. He felt that there was a broad, general injustice in the situation, but absolute right as to facts. These were men to whom was given the power to accept or refuse. No one could question their right to use that power. Horace said to himself that he was probably a fool to entertain for a moment any hope of success under such conditions. "Good Lord! It might depend upon whether the readers had indigestion," he thought; and at the same time he accepted the situation with a philosophic pride of surrender. "It's about one chance in a good many thousand," he told himself. "If I don't get the chance some other fellow does, and there's no mortal way but to make the best of it, unless I act like a fool myself." Horace was exceedingly alive to the lack of dignity of one who kicked against the pricks. He said to himself that if he could not marry Rose, if he could not ask her why, he must accept his fate, not attack it to his own undoing, nor even deplore it to his ignominy. In all this he was, rather curiously, leaving the girl and her possible view of the matter entirely out of the question. Horace, while he was not in the least self-deprecatory, and was disposed to be as just in his estimate of himself as of other men, was not egotistical. It did not really occur to him that Rose's fancy, too, might have been awakened as his own had been, that he might cause her suffering. It went to prove his unselfishness that, upon entering the house, and seeing Rose seated beside a window with her embroidery, his first feeling was of satisfaction that she was housed and safe from the fast-gathering storm. Rose looked up as he entered, and smiled. "There's a storm overhead," remarked Horace. "Yes," said Rose. "Aunt Sylvia has just told me I ought not to use a needle, with so much lightning. She has been telling me about a woman who was sewing in a thunder-storm, and the needle was driven into her hand." Rose laughed, but as she spoke she quilted her needle into her work and tossed it on a table, got up, and went to the window. "It looks almost wild enough for a cyclone," she said, gazing up at the rapid scud of gray, shell-like clouds. "Rose, come right away from that window," cried Sylvia, entering from the dining-room. "Only last summer a woman in Alford got struck standing at a window in a tempest." "I want to look at the clouds," said Rose, but she obeyed.