"Good-night," she said. "Come to me to-morrow. No, you must not
come in." She cut short Orde's insistence and the eloquence that
had just found its life by slipping inside the half-open door and
closing it after her.

Orde stood for a moment uncertain; then turned away and walked up
the street, his eyes so blinded by the greater glory that he all but
ran down an inoffensive passer-by.

At the hotel he wrote a long letter to his mother. The first part
was full of the exultation of his discovery. He told of his good
fortune quite as something just born, utterly forgetting his
mother's predictions before he came East. Then as the first
effervescence died, a more gloomy view of the situation came
uppermost. To his heated imagination the deadlock seemed complete.
Carroll's devotion to what she considered her duty appeared
unbreakable. In the reaction Orde doubted whether he would have it
otherwise. And then his fighting blood surged back to his heart.
All the eloquence, the arguments, the pleadings he should have
commanded earlier in the evening hurried belated to their posts.
After the manner of the young and imaginative when in the white fire
of emotion, he began dramatising scenes between Carroll and himself.
He saw them plainly. He heard the sound of his own voice as he
rehearsed the arguments which should break her resolution. A
woman's duty to her own soul; her obligation toward the man she
could make or mar by her love; her self-respect; the necessity of a
break some time; the advantage of having the crisis over with now
rather than later; a belief in the ultimate good even to Mrs. Bishop
of throwing that lady more on her own resources; and so forth and so
on down a list of arguments obvious enough or trivial enough, but