It had not always been an open victory--the weight of all the past lay too heavily upon him for that--but for _her_ sake he had at least vacillated and hesitated and temporized, waiting and looking for that final strength which would come with her first wistful note of warning, or with her belated return to his side.
Yet here was Opportunity lying close and thick about him; here Chance had laid the board for its most tempting game.

In that way, as the young Chicagoan had said, they stood in the centre of the world.

But he had turned away from those clustering temptations, he had left unbroken his veneer of honorable life, for her sake--while she herself had surrendered, unmistakably, irrevocably, whatever strange form the surrender might even at that moment be taking.
All he could do, now, was to wait until morning.

There would surely be some message, some hint, some key to the mystery.

While everything remained so maddeningly enigmatic, he raked through the tangled past in search of some casual seed of explanation for that still undeciphered present.
He recalled, period by period, and scene by scene, his kaleidoscopic past career, his first fatal blunder as a Grand Trunk telegraph operator, when one slip of the wrist brought a gravel train head-on into an Odd Fellows' Excursion special, his summary dismissal from the railroad, and his unhappy flight to New York, his passionate struggle to work his way up once more, his hunger for money and even a few weeks of leisure, that his long dreamed of photo-telegraphy apparatus might be perfected and duly patented, his consequent fall from grace in the Postal-Union offices, through holding up a trivial racing-return or two until he and his outside confederate had been able to make their illicit wagers, then his official ostracism, and his wandering street-cat life, when, at last, the humbling and compelling pinch of poverty had turned him to "overhead guerrilla" work and the dangers and vicissitudes of a poolroom key-operator.