hich had come to him in a voiceless loneliness as
great as his own, watching and listening with him beside the rock. It
seemed nearer to him since he had seen and talked with Gregson. It was
much nearer to him since a few minutes ago, when he had looked upon
what he had first thought to be the face of Eileen Brokaw.

And this was the world--the spirit--that had changed him. He wondered
if Gregson had seen the change which he tried so hard to conceal. He
wondered if Miss Brokaw would see it when she came, and if her soft,
gray eyes would read to the bottom of him as they had fathomed him once
before upon a time which seemed years and years ago. Thoughts like
these troubled him. Twice that day he had found stealing over him a
feeling that was almost physical pain, and yet he knew that this pain
was but the gnawing of a great loneliness in his heart. In these
moments he had been sorry that he had brought Gregson back into his
life. And with Gregson he was bringing back Eileen Brokaw. He was more
than sorry for that. The thought of it made him grow warm and
uncomfortable, though the night air from off the Bay was filled with
the chill tang of the northern icebergs. Again his thoughts brought him
face to face with the old pictures, the old life. With them came
haunting memories of a Philip Whittemore who had once lived, and who
had died; and with these ghosts of the past there surged upon him the
loneliness which seemed to crush and stifle him. Like one in a dream he
was swept back. Over the black spruce at his feet, far into the gray,
misty distances beyond, over forests and mountains and the vast, grim
silences his vision reached out until he saw life as it had begun for
him, and as he had lived it for a time. It had opened fair. It had
given promise. It had filled him with hope and ambition. And then it
had changed.

Unconsciously he clenched his hands as he thought of what had followed,
of the black days of ruin, of death, of the dissolution of all that he
had hoped and dreamed for. He had fought, because he was born a
fighter. He had risen again and again, only to find misfortune still at
his face. At first he had laughed, and had called it bad luck. But the
bad luck had followed him, dogging him with a persistence which
developed in him a new perspective of things. He dropped away from his
clubs. He began to measure men and women as he had not measured them
before, and there grew in him slowly a revulsion for what tho