to be the majestic processional of worlds.  He saw himself as small; the universe as big.  And the knowledge did not crush; it elevated.  Throughout the whole of creation ran the fine chain of divine ordinance, of a law that flowered in beauty.  There was God’s work above him, about him, within him.  And God stood back of it all, vouching for it, making it good.  The spinning of worlds, the pulses of tides, the course of the blood in his veins—­these were kindred phenomena; the law of God bound about with its fine chain of divine will and love the greater and the lesser bodies moving through the universe.  Upon such a comprehension, brotherhood of man and tree and sun and flower, had been raised Mark King’s haphazard edifice of a theory of life.  The stars reminded him that through the eons all had been right with the world of worlds; they sang of hope and happiness and beauty.  They showed a man the way to rich, full contentment.  They lighted the path to generous dealings with other men.  They threw their searchlight upon the day a man had just done with and set him thinking; they led his thoughts ahead to the day soon to dawn, making him wish to make a better job of things.

But to-night between him and his beloved stars stretched a region of shadows through which the eyes of his soul did not look.  Something within him had been stricken; sorely wounded; beaten to its knees; chilled with death.  He sought to think quite calmly, and for a long time clear consecutive thought was beyond his reach.  A moment had come when he could only feel.  He was swept this way and that.  He had given to Gloria his love without stint, without reservation, without limit.  The love which no other woman had ever awakened had poured itself out before Gloria like a flood of clear swift water breaking free.  He loved after the only fashion possible to him, with his whole heart and soul, with his whole being.  He adored.  He made of his beloved a princess, a goddess.  He saw her upon a plane where no woman ever lived, in an atmosphere too rare for flesh-and-blood humanity.  A man does not love through human reason; rather through a reason, hidden even to him, deeper than humanity.  Then Gloria had put her hand into his; Gloria had married him; Gloria had elected to come with him.  After that he had seen nothing in its true light; Gloria had remade the world into paradise ineffable.

He had been on the heights, lifted among the stars.  And without warning, without mercy, the world had crashed about him.  From the zenith to the nadir.  Small wonder that thoughts did not come logically!  He floundered, lost, crushed, bewildered.

Just yonder, on the bed of fir-boughs he had made for her, lay Gloria.  He did not look that way.  The wind was rising; he heard it go rushing through the tree-tops; it struck with sudden, relentless impact; it set the shivering needles to shrill whistling; it made the staunch old trunks shudder.  He heard the canvas flap-flapping by Gloria’s bed; above him tossing boughs scraped and creaked.