The summer was nearly at an end—a summer that had brought rehabilitation to the Typometer Company, yet rehabilitation of a certain kind, under strict rule, strict economy, endless work. Nominally the same thing, the typometer was now but one factor of trade among a dozen other patented inventions under the control of Rondell Brothers.
If there was not quite the same personal flavor as yet in Justin’s relation to the business which had seemed so inspiringly his own, there was a larger relation to greater interests, a wider field, a greater sense of security, and a sense of justice in the change; he felt that he had much to learn. There was something in him that could not profit where other men profited—that could not take advantage when that advantage meant loss to another. He was not great enough alone to reconcile the narrowing factors of trade with that warring law within him. The stumbling of Cater would have been another stumbling-block if it had not been that one; that for which Leverich, with Martin always behind him, had chosen Justin first had been the very thing that had fought against them.
He held out his arm unconsciously as Lois stole into the room
The summer was far spent. Justin had been working hard. It was long after midnight. Lois slept, but Justin could not; he rose and went into the adjoining room, and sat down by the open window. The night had been very close, but now a faint breath stirred from somewhere out of the darkness. It was just before the dawn—Justin looked out into a gloom in which the darkness of trees wavered uncertainly and brought with it a vague remembrance. He had done all this before. When? Suddenly he recollected the night he had sat at this same window, at the beginning of this terrible journey, and his thoughts and feelings then; his deep loneliness of soul, the prevision of the pain even of fulfillment—an endless, endless arid waste, with the welling forth of that black spirit of evil in his own nature as the only vital thing to bear him secret company—a moment that was wolfish to his better nature. Almost with the remembrance came the same mood, but only as reflected in the surface of his saner nature, not arising from it.
As he gazed, wrapped in self-communing, on the vague formlessness of the night, it began gradually to dissolve mysteriously, and the outlines of the trees and the surrounding objects melted into view; a bird sang from somewhere near by, a heavenly, clear, full-throated call that brought a shaft of light from across the world, broadening, as the eye leaped to it, into a great and spreading glory of flame.
It had rained just before; the drops still hung on bush and tree, and as the dazzling radiance of the sun touched them every drop also radiated light, prismatic and scintillating—an almost audibly tinkling joy. So indescribably wonderful and beautiful, yet so tender, seemed this scene—as of a mighty light informing the least atom of our tearful human existence—that the profoundest depths of Justin’s nature opened to the illumination.