Sometimes in his anguish he could not forbear to complain against Fate, as had so often been recorded of weak mortals in the pages of the ancient authors. Yet an act so ignoble was one proof the more of his inferiority. He heard the accent of earth’s lowliest in his own lament. He began to envy the persons in the streets of the great city, those thrice-blessed Olympians who were unvisited by doubt and by constant repining. These did not doubt of their own divinity. Even that clay which at first he had thought so common, that of his mentor James Dodson, who in his heart despised him utterly, but who in his contemptuous clemency forbore from rejecting him, even he made no secret of the fact that, had he not learned to experience a profound distrust of the female sex, he would have claimed the hand of the goddess in marriage. Yet one of the clay of William Jordan was not permitted to prostrate himself in the earth before her. Research among the modern authors afforded him neither light nor healing; and in this dark hour he did not dare to carry his plaint to those of older growth. Indeed, his desertion of them for these lesser spirits had come to seem like an act of sedition. But soon a darker tragedy was to divert the channel of his thoughts. XXX One night, long after midnight had passed, the white-haired man, his father, said to him, “My beloved Achilles, hast thou the strength to contemplate a woeful calamity?” The sound of the aged voice, as sorrowful as the autumn winds among the chimney-pots, caused the young man to lift his sunken eyes from the page upon which they lay. “Is it, O my father,” he said, “that we are threatened with the most dire of all catastrophes?” “Yes, my beloved,” said his father. “Indeed, the most dire of all catastrophes is consummated already. This is the morning of Monday. If--how shall I reveal it to thee, Achilles” (the anguish in the eyes of the old man was insupportable)--“if by Friday at noon we cannot obtain twenty pieces of gold for the price of our roof, we shall be driven forth of our little room, thou and I, beloved one, into the gross darkness of the streets of the great city.” At first the young man’s mind was like a blank page, but all too soon it became susceptible to the words his father had uttered. “O my father!” he cried, “I have known these many days that Fate was devising some cruel and bloody trial for this craven’s heart.” And then, as a passionate horror swelled his veins, he cried, “This is the untold evil which all my life has lain upon my heart. I have such a bitter horror of the streets of the great city, my father, that I would prefer to embrace death.” The face of the old man was like that of a corpse. “Do I not know it, my beloved?” he said. “Was it not these loins that imbued this horror in thy tender veins? Yet Fate has spoken; only one thing remains unto us.” “What is this thing, my father?” “We can but pray for a miracle to happen.”