Contrary to his habit, he grew reminiscent. He despised this kind of a mood, because, as he said, "It is the weakness of a fool to think about himself." He walked to the window and looked out on the broad fields of The Gaffs in the valley before him. He looked at the handsomely furnished room and thought of the splendid old home. Then he deliberately surveyed himself in the mirror. He smiled: "'Survival of the fittest'--yes, Spencer is right--a great--great mind. He is living now, and the world, of course, will not admit his greatness until he is dead. Life, like the bull that would rule the herd, is never ready to admit that other life is great. A poet is always a dead rhymester,--a philosopher, a dead dreamer. "Let Spencer but die! "Tush! Why indulge in weak modesty and fool self-depreciation? Even instinct tells me--that very lowest of animal intellectual forces--that I survive because I am stronger than the dead. Providence--God--whatever it is, has nothing to do with it except to start you and let you survive by overcoming. Winds you up and then--devil take the hindmost! "It is brains--brains--brains that count--brains first and always. This moral stuff is fit only for those who are too weak to conquer. I have accomplished everything in life I have ever undertaken--everything--and--by brains! Not once have I failed--I have done it by intellect, courage--intuition--the thing in one that speaks. "Now as to things of the heart,"--he stopped suddenly--he even scowled half humorously. It came over him--his failure there, as one who, sweeping with his knights the pawns of an opponent, suddenly finds himself confronting a queen--and checkmated. He walked to the window again and looked toward the northern end of the valley. There the gables of an old and somewhat weather-beaten home sat in a group of beech on a rise among the foothills. "Westmoreland"--he said--"how dilapidated it is getting to be! Something must be done there, and Alice--Alice,"--he repeated the name softly--reverently--"I feel--I know it--she--even she shall be mine--after all these years--she shall come to me yet." He smiled again: "Then I shall have won all around. Fate? Destiny? Tush! It's living and surviving weaker things, such for instance as my cousin Tom." He smiled satisfactorily. He flecked some cotton lint from his coat sleeve. "I have had a hard time in the mill to-day. It's a beastly business robbing the poor little half-made-up devils."