One afternoon, accomplishing again this vain pilgrimage, he found the tree snapped to an untimely end.  It had gone down ingloriously in a twisting gale that had swept the garden the night before.

In answer to his question, the man intent on clearing away the wreckage said: 

“The wind just caught it right...  It was dying, anyway.”

Fred Starratt retraced his steps.  It was as if the old tree had stood as a symbol of his own life.

He never went back to view the old garden again, but, instead, he stood at midnight upon the corner past which Ginger walked with such monotonous and terrible fidelity.  He would stand off in the shadows and see her go by, sometimes alone, but more often in obscene company.  And in those moments he tasted the concentrated bitterness of life.  Was this really a malicious jest or a test of his endurance?  To what black purpose had belated love sprung up in his heart for this woman of the streets?  And to think that once he had fancied that so withering a passion was as much a matter of good form as of cosmic urging!  There had been conventions in love—­and styles and seasons!  One loved purity and youth and freshness.  Yes, it had been as easy as that for him.  Just as it had been as easy for him to choose a nice and pallid calling for expressing his work-day joy.  He could have understood a feeling of sinister passion for Sylvia Molineaux and likewise he could have indulged it.  But the snare was more subtle and cruel than that.  He was fated to feel the awe and mystery and beauty of a rose-white love which he saw hourly trampled in the grime of the streets.  He had fancied once that love was a matter of give and take ... he knew now that it was essentially an outpouring ... that to love was sufficient to itself ... that it could be without reward, or wage, or even hope.  He knew now that it could spring up without sowing, endure without rain, come to its blossoming in utter darkness.  And yet he did not have the courage of these revelations.  He felt their beauty, but it was the beauty of nakedness, and he had no skill to weave a philosophy with which to clothe them.  If it had been possible a year ago for him to have admitted so cruel a love he knew what he would have done.  He would have waited for her upon this selfsame street corner and shot her down, turning the weapon upon himself.  Yes, he would have been full of just such empty heroics.  Thus would he have expressed his contempt and scorn of the circumstance which had tricked him.  But now he was beyond so conventional a settlement.

The huddled meetings about Storch’s shattered lamp were no more, but in small groups the scattered malcontents exchanged whispered confidences in any gathering place they chanced upon.  Fred Starratt listened to the furtive reports of their activities with morbid interest.  But he had to confess that, so far, they were proving empty windbags.  The promised reign of terror seemed still a long way off.