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 blindness, his dramatic ambition, the calamity which shattered that career and made him a seller of books, each had been a step into power. His passion for Marien even, while it was a fall, was a fall into knowledge, which taught him self-control and made his love for Bessie a tenderer and, as he fancied, a stauncher devotion than it could otherwise have been.

This gave him a feeling, half-superstitious and half-religious, that his existence was being ordered for him by a power above his own. The effect of this was to increase his eager zest for life itself. He lived excitedly, hurrying continually, to see what would leap out at him from behind the next corner.

Meantime, he was making money. Within six months all the bills were paid and he had more than a thousand dollars in the bank. Rose was out of the sanitarium and, with Dick and Tayna, was housed in a cottage on the slope of a hill in western San Francisco, where the setting sun flashed its farewell upon the windows, and the wide ocean rolled always in the distance.

John was beginning, too, to feel that the time had come when he could go back to Bessie and tell her of his love. The past seemed very far past indeed. The memory of those whirlwind hours of passionate attachment to Marien Dounay was like a distorted dream of some drug-induced slumber into which he had sunk but once, and from which he had awakened forever.

Letters had passed frequently between himself and Bessie. On his part, these were carefully studied and almost devoutly restrained in expression; but none the less freighted in every line with the fervor of his growing devotion to her.

On her part, the letters were as frankly and impulsively rich with the essence of her own happy, effervescent self as they had always been. She had expressed a loyal sym-