ocks and herds
had long since gone to the mountain pastures. The dry channel between
shelvy banks of gravel showed white in the unclouded yet dull
starlight. The air was lifeless, and faintly tainted with smoke from
forest fires in the mountains.

Will threw himself down on his face, clutching with his fingers at the
gritty dirt. He knew as surely then, looking forward to his life, as
he will know at the end looking back, that this would never be an
out-lived romance. Nor could he creep back into that temple of dreams
from which Winifred's own hand had lured him--it had crumbled to dust
behind him. Nor was he like one who, losing a woman, loses only his
best pleasure and best ambition; she was the vital condition to every
pleasure, every ambition; losing her, he lost all. The realization
clutched him by this time like a tiger. There was not a living
creature within miles; a man might go down to primal depths, might
drop even the restraint of the human in outcries and struggles as free
as a tortured beast's. It may be that solitude sees more such scenes
than a decently decorous world would like to think.

Yet there was a sense upon him of some moral demand, some decision to
be made; and in time he began to try to collect himself for it. It
would seem as if there could hardly be a position that left less for
him to decide. There was no question of renouncing--he had never had
anything to renounce. Nevertheless, his instinct was correct in urging
him to a moral conflict and a momentous decision. The question was
simply whether he could pick up his life again, could find faith that
anything was worth living for; or whether life was to be a hollow
going through the forms--frustrated, purposeless, full of brooding
regret and jealousy, shame, and sense of wrong. But he could not drag
his bruised mind up to the question; he could not even think what it
was. He lifted himself up, stepped down into the dry channel, and
knelt on the white stones, obeying old association with the attitude;
laid his arms and head on a shelf of the bank, and let the stunned and
nerveless will lie passive, while the accumulated forces of years--of
generations--passion and pain and despair and love, shame and
bitterness and loyalty--trampled back and forth over him, fighting out
for him his battle.

It was deathly, aggressively still; not an insect to chirp, not a tree
to rustle; only bare earth and sodden air. After a long time Will
raised his hea