The next evening still there was no letter. Keyes's spirit was troubled. He sought the solace of solitude in the quiet, shadowed streets. A reaction was succeeding his rosy complacency! Doubts pierced his dissolving confidence. Was his story so good, after all? Somehow, as he looked back at it now, it seemed much less strong than it had before. He felt a sort of sinking in his stomach. A sickening suspicion came to him that, perhaps, it was absurd. Maybe it was very silly. In a disconnected way certain remarks and passages in it came back to him now as quite questionable. Yes, they sounded pretty maudlin. He squirmed within with mortification as a recollection of these passages passed through his mind. He hoped his story would never get into print. A fear that it might nauseated him. Then he was suffused with a sensation of how little he amounted to. He felt, with a sense of great weakness, the precariousness of his job. A horror came over him that he might lose it. He wished he did not know Louise, who expected things of him. He felt how awkward it was so to fail her. In the position he had got himself into with her, how he had laid himself open to humiliating exposure! Oh, why had he ever sought her? He wished he did not know anybody well. He was an ass and he would never come to anything. He felt the futility of his life. Why could he not slink away somewhere and live out his feeble existence unobserved? As he got into bed he felt that very easily he could cry. * * * * * The August FAVORITE MAGAZINE This number contains The Great Prize Story by BENJAMIN CECIL KEYES GET IT!! * * * * * ... Keyes stood before a downtown news-stand. Hurrying pedestrians bumped into him. An irascible character or two, thus impeded, glared back at him--what was the matter with the fellow! Did he think there was nobody but himself in the world? B. C. Keyes walked home to the sound of a great orchestra reverberating through him. He could not tolerate the thought of subduing himself to the confinement of a car. He needed movement and air. It had come, his great letter, a few weeks before. At his sitting down to dinner his mother had given him the envelope. _The Favorite Magazine_--these words had seemed to him to be printed in the upper left-hand corner; it had struck him that perhaps the strain on his nerves of late had so deranged his mind that he now saw, as in a mirage, what was not. "Benjamin C. Keyes, Esq."--so ran the address. Keyes in his dizziness noted this point: people had not customarily addressed him as _esquire_. Then, for the first time in his life, he held in his hand a substantial check payable to his own name--wealth! Courteous and laudatory typewritten words danced before his burning eyes.