In the train Stephen sat close to the window, a forbidding shoulder turned toward a possibly loquacious seat-mate. His very heart was sick, but he fancied that it was his body, made so by the motion of the car. Usually he enjoyed the ride, first through the region of breakers and culm banks which took on a weird picturesqueness on a bright day, then along the upper reaches of the Susquehanna and the narrow defile through which the Lehigh passes at Mauch Chunk, and into the farm lands farther down. He liked also to note the changing speech, the foreign tongues in his own neighborhood, the broad Pennsylvania German at Allentown, the less accented speech near Philadelphia. But to-day nothing engaged his attention but his own misery.
On the news-stand in the station in Philadelphia he saw the Students' Quarterly. He was tempted at first to pass quickly by and thus put off for a while the final realization of his shame, but he bought a copy and walked through the station to a bench so placed that he could turn his back to all the world. When he sat down he found that he was holding his breath, though suspense was not exactly his condition of mind, since suspense implied some hope, and he believed that there was none for Stephen Lanfair.
Then his lips parted and his eyes dilated and a deadly paleness spread over a countenance already white. The day of miracles was not past; God did not mean him to be destroyed.
He found the article, "A New Theory," and his name "Stephen Lanfair." He found under his name a note: "This article is not original, but is an abstract of a mistaken and amusing but ingenious treatise by John Dalling, a famous London physician. It was first published in England in 1837." The note, a reader would have said, was placed there by the contributor himself.
Saint Elizabeth, finding in the fifteenth century the loaves in her apron turned to roses in answer to her prayer, may have been surprised. Stephen Lanfair, finding a similar benison in the nineteenth, was stupefied.
When the machinery of his brain began to operate, he tried to fathom the mystery. He had not written the note himself, that was certain—some good angel in the guise of a critic had saved him, and the only person through whose hands the manuscript had passed was Edward Levis.
Having crossed the city he knew not how, he found Levis in his poor room. He was as thin as Lanfair and looked, with his black beard, twenty years older. He took off a pair of large spectacles and bade his guest sit down. Stephen remembered having heard that he had been a foundling, brought up at Girard College.
He did not answer Levis's greeting, he simply held out the magazine.
"Did you put that note in, Levis?"
Levis flushed. His nature was one of intense reserve and he anticipated and deplored the unpleasantness of a confession. He believed that he understood the boyish rashness which was to blame for Lanfair's mistake, and he had added the note for his sake as well as for the sake of the magazine.