Daniel shut his lips sharply over his clenched teeth. It wasn’t a new idea; it wasn’t even a suggestion. He had known it all along, he told himself, and yet the bare words were brutal. They seemed to brand him like hot iron, to shrivel into his shrinking flesh and leave the mark there. “Cripple!” He remembered, in a flash, his well days--the days when he was like other boys, before the fall which lamed him. He remembered his own young scorn of the weakling and the maimed, the repugnance that the physically strong often feel toward the physically disabled. Yet there was nothing disfiguring in his trouble. He was lame, but he was not twisted; he only halted in his walk. But, none the less, he was a cripple. “What kind of a girl d’you think would pick a cripple?” Daniel stared steadily out into the night, as if the starry darkness held the answer. One by one he saw the lights go out in the houses near at hand. Farther off, lights still shone in the town but darkness grew and grew. Then, far off, he detected a moving thing, saw a leap of flame and sparks as the smoke belched from the funnel of the engine. He could trace it coming nearer and nearer, and then he heard the clamor of its bell at the crossing, strangely distinct at night. He turned slowly away, lit the lamp on his table, and, going to his desk, took out the picture of Virginia that he had stolen from the mantel down-stairs after Fanchon’s attack upon it. He brought it to the table, and, setting it down beside him, began to write. From time to time, as he wrote, he glanced up at the young face in the frame, and felt an exquisite sense of companionship. He was not alone; the picture kept him company. The pallor of his face, too, gradually changed, and a slight color rose in his cheeks. He took off his coat and lit his pipe. Well into the small hours he worked steadily on a case for Judge Jessup. He was aware of doors shutting below, aware that sounds gradually ceased and sleep drenched the household, but he worked on with the passionate zeal that only an ambitious man can feel--a man who has no other end in life but to forget himself in the fury of his toil. Yet, all the while, the young face of Virginia bore him mute company, and sometimes it seemed to smile upon him. At daybreak, the fury of his thirst for work slaked, he lifted a haggard face to the light, glanced at the picture, and stretching his arms across the table laid his head upon them with a groan. He fell asleep there from sheer exhaustion and was sleeping when the sun rose. IX