It was a mighty hour. Justin, sitting by the open window with his head upon his hand, looking out into the night, saw but dimly the pale shining of the familiar stars, in the search for the rising star of his own future. It was far on in the small hours, and he had not yet slept, although he had come up-stairs at twelve o’clock with the firm intention of undressing and going to bed at once. He had, instead, dropped down into the wicker chair in the unlighted sitting-room to think for a few moments—and a few moments—and a few moments more. The dining-table which he had left was filled with sheets of paper covered with fine figures, and his mind at first continually reverted to them, multiplying, subtracting, and correcting with keen facility, and with infinitesimal changes in the final result, which he knew, notwithstanding, could be only approximate, no matter how painstakingly his fancy strove to render it exact. After a while, however, other thoughts asserted themselves. The vast influences of the night were around him as from the deep places of the universe—the depth of dusky gloom, the depth of silence. The window looked out over a garden, but in this dusky gloom it had lost the semblance of earth and seemed, instead, but the under part of an enveloping cloud in which he was the only breathing human life. The vague dark branches of the trees waving across the lesser darkness spoke of even deeper mystery in their mute witness to that breath from the unseen which moved them. It was not the problem of the universe of which all this spoke to Justin Alexander, though as such it had been part and parcel of his questioning youth. The days when he might have sung with Omar were gone with those speculative midnight hours, the foregathering with death, the conscious search for higher meanings, the effort to solve the unknowable; whatever philosophy was evolved from those journeys into the dark was labeled and put away on a remote shelf, where the mind occasionally reverted to it with a sigh of thoughtful possession, but for which there was no longer any daily use. There was even a chance that on bringing the precious package out into the modern daylight it might be found to have changed its color entirely. The problem of his own life was what this hour held in its shifting hold for Justin, the wavering veiled outlines on which he gazed seemed to prefigure the uncertain boundaries of his own future. To a man who has a family, the leaving of a certain occupation for an uncertain one, even though it promise much, is like taking a leap off into space.