about those millions; the expectation of them had
always vaguely dazzled his imagination, tampered more than he was aware
with the sincerity of his feelings, with the reality of his life; but now
the shower of gold had fallen all about him and his fancy stretched its
eyes to take in the immediate glitter.

Why, thought Hilliard, this turns life upside down ... I can begin to
live ... I can go East. He saw that the world and its gifts were as truly
his as though he were a fairy prince. A sort of confusion of highly
colored pictures danced through his quick and ignorant brain. The blood
pounded in his ears. He got up and prowled about the little room. It was
oppressively small. He felt caged. The widest prairie would have given
him scant elbow-room. He was planning his trip to the East when the
thought of Sheila first struck him like a cold wave ... or rather it was
as if the wave of his selfish excitement had crashed against the wave of
his desire for her. All was foam and confusion in his spirit. He was
quite incapable of self-sacrifice--a virtue in which his free life and
his temperament had given him little training. It was simply a war of
impulses. His instinct was to give up nothing--to keep hold of every
gift. He wanted, as he had never in his life wanted anything before, to
have his fling. He wanted his birthright of experience. He had cut
himself off from all the gentle ways of his inheritance and lived like a
very Ishmael through no fault of his own. Now, it seemed to him that
before he settled down to the soberness of marriage, he must take one
hasty, heady, compensating draft of life, of the sort of life he might
have had. He would go East, go at once; he would fling himself into a
tumultuous bath of pleasure, and then he would come back to Sheila and
lay a great gift of gold at her feet. He thought over his plans,
reconstructing them. He got pen and ink and wrote a letter to Sheila. He
wrote badly--a schoolboy's inexpressive letter. But he told his story and
his astounding news and drew a vivid enough picture of the havoc it had
wrought in his simplicity. He used a lover's language, but his letter was
as cold and lumpish as a golden ingot. And yet the writer was not cold.
He was throbbing and distraught, confused and overthrown, a boy of
fourteen beside himself at the prospect of a holiday ... It was a stolen
holiday, to be sure, a sort of truancy from manliness, but none the less
intoxicating for that. Cosme'