o load their goods. And I know
beyond doubt that they are gone, and that they will not return
hither.... Now I am weary and would rest."

His voice was utterly dead, without life or spirit. Nicodemus, pierced
by a glimmer of strange knowledge, laid a hand upon his shoulder. Very
dearly he loved his shaggy teller of tales, even though he knew that
whether he loved or not was small matter to his idol. His voice lowered
to a husky growl of tenderness.

"Son, is all well with thee?"

A spasm, swift and sharp, passed over Nicanor's face, and was gone like
a shadow. His eyes flinched as though a hand had touched a raw and
quivering nerve.

"Nay," he answered, very quietly. "It is not well."

He wandered out, in time, away from their anxious questionings, across
the marsh-ford, and toward the gray hills which rolled away to east and
west, where the noise of the traffic could not follow. He threw himself
upon the ground and stared upward at the gray misty skies, where no blue
showed through and where black dots of birds went sailing. Here was the
ground of his boyhood dreams,--he knew it with a tinge of
bitterness,--dreams that had ended always under gray skies, upon the
bleak hills of the uplands. Here, where the full shy heart of him had
first known the secret of its power in those long-gone boyhood days, he
had entered upon his heritage, thinking only of its joy, knowing nothing
of its pain. And here he had returned. Then he had seen himself a
soaring lark, singing out its life in pure joy and triumph in a fair
world of dreams and sunshine. Now he knew that the lark was caged,
doomed to beat its wings forever against bars stronger than iron, that
the dreams were shattered and the world was dark. His life was empty;
he had lost all, a slave without a master, a singer whose song was
stilled. His face, unchanging, stared at the changeless sky; he lay
stolid and motionless, and aching with dumb loneliness. Out of all the
world he knew himself alone, set apart from his kind by that heritage
which his ardent youth had thought all joy; alien, with his world not
the world of those around him, and his way the way of loneliness.

In time, Nature had her way with him, and he slept, alone upon the
hillside, in the dead slumber of exhaustion. The world thundered on
around him; the web of Life unrolled endlessly from the distaff of the
Second Fate; and he slept on, unheeding.

VI

In the late afternoon, when gray shadows were