Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him as a “coming man.” While his style of writing was steadily improving, he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant spoke of him as an impressive example of the “journalistic blight.” Those who looked deeper saw the truth—a dangerous facility, a perilous inertia, a fatal entanglement. Facility enabled him to earn a good living with ease, working as he chose. Inertia prevented him from seeking opportunities for advancement. Entanglement shut him off from the men and women of his own kind who would have thrust opportunities upon him and compelled him.

Howard himself saw this clearly in his occasional moods of self-criticism. But as he saw no remedy, he raged intermittently and briefly, and straightway relapsed. Vanity supplied him with many excuses and consolations. Was he not one of the best reporters in the profession? Where was there another, where indeed in any profession were there many of his age, making five thousand a year? Was he not always improving his mind? Was he not more and more careful in his personal habits? Was he not respected by all who knew him; looked upon as a successful man; regarded by those with whom he came in daily contact as a leader in the profession, a model for style, a marvel for facility and versatility and for the quantity of good “copy” he could turn out in a brief time? But with all the soothings of vanity he never could quite hide from himself that his life was a failure up to that moment.

“Why try to lie to myself?” he thought. “It’s never a question of what one has done but always of what one could have and should have done. I am thirty and I have been marking time for at least four years. Preparing by study and reading? Yes, but not preparing for anything.”

On the whole he was glad that Alice had refused to marry him. Her reason was valid. But there was another which he thought she did not see. He was deceived as to the depth of her insight because he did not watch her closely. He had no suspicion how many, many times, in their moments of demonstrativeness, she listened for those words which never came, listened and turned away to hide from him the disappointment in her eyes.

He did not love her—and she knew it. She did not inspire ambition in him—and she knew it. She simply kept him comfortable and contented. She simply prevented his amatory instincts from gathering strength vigorously to renew that search which men and women keep up incessantly until they find what they seek. She knew this also but never permitted herself to see it clearly.

He was pleased with her but not proud of her. He was not exactly ashamed of his relation with her but—well, he never relaxed his precautions for keeping it conventionally concealed. He still had a room at his club and occupied it occasionally. He laughed at himself, despised himself in a—gentle, soothing way. But he excused himself to himself with earnestness despite his sarcasms at his own expense. And for the most of the time he was content—so well, so comfortably content that if his mind had not been so nervously active he would have taken on the form and look of settled middle-life.

There was just the one saving quality—his mental alertness. All his life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was now keeping him from the sluggard’s fate.

On the last day of January—six weeks after his thirtieth birthday—he came home earlier than usual, as they were going to the theatre and were to dine at seven. He found Alice in bed and the doctor sitting beside her.

“You’ll have to get some one else to go with you, I’m afraid,” she said with good-humoured resignation, a trifle over-acted. “My cold is worse and the doctor says I must stay in bed.”

“Nothing serious?” Howard asked anxiously, for her cheeks were flaming.

“Oh, no. Just the cold. And I am taking care of myself.”

He accompanied the doctor to the door of the apartment. At the threshold the doctor whispered: “Make some excuse and come to my office. I wish to see you particularly.”

He grew pale. “Don’t let her see,” urged the doctor. He went back to Alice, sick at heart. “I must go out and arrange for some one else to do the play for me,” he said. “I shall spend the evening with you.”

She protested, but faintly. He went to the doctor’s office.

“She must go south at once,” he began, after looking at Howard steadily and keenly. “Nothing can save her life. That may prolong it.”

Howard seemed not to understand.

“She must go to-morrow or she’ll be gone forever in ten days.”

“Impossible,” Howard said in a dull, dazed tone.

“At once, I tell you—at once.”

“Impossible,” Howard repeated. He was saying to himself, “And only this afternoon I wished I were free and wondered how I could free myself.” He laughed strangely.

“Impossible,” he said again. And again he laughed. The room swam around. He stood up. “Impossible!” he said a fourth time, almost shouting it. And he struck the doctor full in the face, reeled and fell headlong to the floor. When he recovered consciousness he was lying on a lounge, the doctor’s assistant standing beside him.

“I must go to her,” he exclaimed and sat up. He saw the doctor a few feet away, holding a cloth odorous of arnica to his cheek. Howard remembered and began, “I beg your pardon,”—The doctor interrupted with: “Not at all. I’ve had many queer experiences but never one like that.” But Howard had ceased to hear. He was staring vacantly at the floor, repeating to himself, “And I wished to be free. And I am to be free.”

“You must go back to her. Take her south tomorrow. Asheville is the best place.”

Howard was on his way to the door. “We shall go by the first train,” he said.

“Pardon me for telling you so abruptly,” said the doctor, following him. “But I saw that you weren’t—that is I couldn’t help noticing that you and she were—And usually the man in such cases—well, my sympathy is for the woman.”

“Do you think a man voluntarily lives with a woman because he hates her?” Howard asked, with an angry sneer. He bowed coldly and was gone.

As he looked at Alice he saw that it was of no use to try to deceive her. “We must go South in the morning,” he almost whispered, taking her hand and kissing it again and again, slowly and gently.

The next day but one they were at Asheville and two weeks later Howard could not hide from himself that she would soon be gone.

Her bed was drawn up to the open window and she Was propped with pillows. A mild breeze was flooding the room with the odours of the pine forests and the gardens. She looked out, dilated her nostrils and her eyes.

“Beautiful!” she murmured. “It is so easy to die here.”

She put out her hand and laid it in his.

“I want you, my Alice.” He was looking into her eyes and she into his. “I need you. I can’t do without you.”

She smiled with an expression of happiness. “Is it wrong,” she asked, “to take pleasure in another’s pain? I see that you are in pain, that you suffer. And, oh, it makes me happy, so happy.”

“Don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t.”

“But listen,” she went on. “Don’t you see why? Because I—because I love you. There,” she was smiling again. “I promised myself I never, never would say it first. And I’ve broken my word.”

“What do you mean?”

“For nearly four years—all the years I’ve really lived—I have had only one thought—my love for you. But I never would say it, never would say ‘I love you,’ because I knew that you did not love me.”

He was beginning to speak but she lifted her hand to his lips. Then she put it back in his and pushed her fingers up his coat-sleeve until they were hidden, resting upon his bare arm.

“No, you did not.” Her voice was low and the words came slowly. “But since we came here, you have loved me. If I were to get well, were to go back, you would not. Ah, if you knew, if you only knew how I have wanted your love, how I have lain awake night after night, hour after hour, whispering under my breath ‘I love you. I love you. Why do you not love me?’”

Howard put his head down so that his face was hid from her in her lap.

“After the doctor had talked to me a few minutes, had asked me a few questions,” she went on, “I knew. And I was not sorry. It was nearly over, anyhow, dear. Did you know it? I often wondered if you did. Yes, I saw many little signs. I wouldn’t admit it to myself until this illness came. Then I confessed it to myself. And I was not sorry we were to part this way. But I did not expect”—and she drew a long breath—“happiness!”

“No, no,” he protested, lifting his face and looking at her. She drank in the expression of his eyes—the love, the longing, the misery—as if it had been a draught of life.

“Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long, long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last—love!”

There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: “I loved you from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was so self-absorbed. And you—you fed my vanity, never insisted upon yourself.”

“But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to you what I have been.”

“I love you.” Howard’s voice had a passionate earnestness in it that carried conviction. “The light goes out with you.”

“With this little candle? No, no, dear—my dear. You will be a great man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I’m afraid I didn’t help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in there. And you’ll open the door every once in a while and come in and take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think—yes, I feel that—that I shall know and thrill.”

Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently he called the nurse.

The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went nearer.

“Why, they’ve made you very gay this morning,” he laughed, “with the red ribbons at your neck.”

There was no answer. He came still nearer. The red ribbons were long streamers of blood. She was dead.