Was life beginning, then, or ending?  If life only could change and renew itself like the seasons, with the perpetually recurring springs!  But youth comes only once, and thereafter the man gathers the fruit of it, sweet or bitter.

Jack was not given to moralizing, but perhaps a subtle suggestion of this came to him in the thought that an enterprise, a new enterprise, might have seemed easier in May, when the forces of nature were with him, than in October.  There was something, at least, that fell in with his mood, a mood of acquiescence in failure, in this closing season of the year, when he stood empty-handed in the harvest-time.

“Edith,” he said, as they paced down the walk which was flaming with scarlet and crimson borders, and turned to look at the peaceful brown house, “I hate to go.”

“But you are not going,” said Edith, brightly.  “I feel all the time as if you were just coming back.  Jack, do you know,” and she put her hand on his shoulder, “this is the sweetest home in the world now!”

“It is the only one, dear;” and Jack made the statement with a humorous sense of its truth.  “Well, there’s the train, and I’m off with the other clerks.”

“Clerk, indeed!” cried Edith, putting up her face to his; “you are going to be a Merchant Prince, Jack, that is what you are going to be.”

On the train there was an atmosphere of business.  Jack felt that he was not going to the New York that he knew—­not to his New York, but to a city of traffic; down into the streets of commercial enterprise, not at all to the metropolis of leisure, of pleasure, to the world of clubs and drawing-rooms and elegant loiterings and the rivalries of society life.  That was all ended.  Jack was hurrying to catch the down-town car for the dingy office of Fletcher & Co. at an hour fixed.

It was ended, to be sure, but the struggle with Jack in his new life was not ended, his biographer knows, for months and years.

It was long before he could pass his club windows without a pang of humiliation, or lift his hat to a lady of his acquaintance in her passing carriage without a vivid feeling of separateness from his old life.  For the old life—­he could see that any day in the Avenue, any evening by the flaming lights—­went by in its gilded chariots and entrancing toilets, the fascinating whirl of Vanity Fair crowned with roses and with ennui.  Did he regret it?  No doubt.  Not to regret would have been to change his nature, and that were a feat impossible for his biographer to accomplish.  In a way his life was gone, and to build up a new life, serene and enduring, was not the work of a day.

One thing he did not regret in the shock he had received, and that was the absence of Carmen and her world.  When he thought of her he had a sense of escape.  She was still abroad, and he heard from time to time that Mavick was philandering about from capital to capital in her train.  Certainly he would have envied neither of them if he had been aware, as the reader is aware, of the guilty secret that drew them together and must be forever their torment.  They knew each other.