Page:Held to Answer (1916).pdf/176

 gathered; just to follow his vision on and on until in absent-minded admiration of a sunset glow he stepped off the brow of El Capitan in Yosemite and fell hundreds of feet to death. Yet John's grief was strangely tempered by the thought that somehow this death was fitting. It was like the man's life. In art he had tried to walk the heights with no solid ground of ability beneath, and he had fallen into the bottomless abyss of failure.

For a moment John pitied Charles greatly; yet when he thought of Rose, prostrated, as he was sure, not by grief, but by long anxieties, his feeling turned to one of reproach. When he thought of the children left fatherless, with no provision for their future or that of Rose, the reproach turned to bitterness. He found himself judging Charles very sternly, and a verse from scripture came into his mind,—something about the man who provides not for his own being worse than a murderer.

But in the midst of this condemnation, Hampstead's jaw dropped, and he sat staring at the pen with which he was preparing to write. The expression on the man's face had changed from concern to one of agony. When the pain passed, his features were gray and tenantless, almost the look of the dead; for John Hampstead had suddenly perceived that his stage career was ended!

Rose, Dick and Tayna were now "his own." To give Rose the best of care, upon which his heart had instantly determined, he must have what were to him large sums of money weekly and monthly; money for nurses, money for doctors, for sanitariums possibly; and perhaps Dick and Tayna must be sent to boarding-school or some place like that for the present, while their higher education must also be considered and provided for.

John knew he could never do these things and follow the stage. He could succeed upon the stage; he had proven that, to his own satisfaction at least; but he could