Doubtless the danger was not great. But with his challenge he had heightened it. He sat thrilled, expectant, ready to be struck. And with the fierceness of his imagining and his fancied gauntlet flung to fate, it was a brave thing he did. As the last flash had bared the sky, careening with its black clouds above his window, so his test came to illumine the cluttered mystery of his soul. He did not know if he was guilty, if he was weak, if he was wrong. Let the lightning tell! In the breathless pauses of the storm, he heard his heart leaping against his throat. He felt the weight of his body vibrant in the atmosphere. And so he stayed--awaiting his doom, if it cared to meet him, purified by this arbitrary danger and the dread contact it afforded with the illimitable, groaning heavens. It was a game; and in it, he for the nonce, seemed the opponent of an infinitude. The fires swept past him. And he remained unscathed. He felt this and smiled at his recklessness. For even if there had been no danger, he had created one and braved it. Now, in the lull, his reveries grew less inchoate, his sense of fear and danger crystallized and fixed upon a less fancied, sweeping thing. He began to think of Julia. He realized that he had done nothing; and solved nothing. He realized that he loved her--as a woman. The thought that at his age, he had earned this eternal, mystic guerdon--love--went through him like the bolt he had invited. And then, subtly, sweetly almost, came the bolt’s aftermath: like the crumbled, gutted charring of a tree that has sung high its song of death as the storm embraced it. And that aftermath for him was all that seemed left of his proud structure of ideals:--Professor Deering, a ruined tree with its leaves piteously seared! Before this menace of fire, Quincy at last jumped from his seat, which the storm had not made him quit. He paced his room, to and fro, delirious with this new birth, hands tremulously open, and head bowed. It could not be! It must not be! He would save his ideals; he would not be a Judas to his Christ. She who stood burning now, in the corner of his brain, must be cast out like a brand, ere her fearful conflagration caught. He went to bed; and still the flame of her danced and still the leaves of his tree trembled piteously and fell away. Here he felt conflict; here he felt tempest. For the battle was over. All of the night, he lay wakeful and rocked in the fever of decision which had been now so glamorously announced to him,--and so treacherously made without him, since in truth, within him. He awoke aching and broken and inflamed. His serenity was gone. The mask, in which he had careered all of these months so featly and so gracefully through life, was burned away. He stumbled now against the meanest barrier. The least of his duties reared itself into a crucifix. He suffered. And he struggled. Even so, struggles the beast after the trap has inexorably set.