ge I had glimpses of some one coming slowly down the
zigzag path. Presently, at one of the turnings half-way up the hill,
appeared Mowbray Langdon. "What is he doing here," thought I, scarcely able
to believe my eyes. "Here of all places!" And then I forgot the strangeness
of his being at Dawn Hill in the strangeness of his expression. For it was
apparent, even at the distance which separated us, that he was suffering
from some great and recent blow. He looked old and haggard; he walked like
a man who neither knows nor cares where he is going.

He had not seen me, and my impulse was to avoid him by continuing on toward
the kennels. I had no especial feeling against him; I had not lost Anita
because she cared for him or he for her, but because she did not care for
me--simply that to meet would be awkward, disagreeable for us both. At the
slight noise of my movement to go on, he halted, glanced round eagerly,
as if he hoped the sound had been made by some one he wished to see. His
glance fell on me. He stopped short, was for an instant disconcerted; then
his face lighted up with devilish joy. "You!" he cried. "Just the man!" And
he descended more rapidly.

At first I could make nothing of this remark. But as he drew nearer and
nearer, and his ugly mood became more and more apparent, I felt that he was
looking forward to provoking me into giving him a distraction from whatever
was tormenting him. I waited. A few minutes and we were face to face, I
outwardly calm, but my anger slowly lighting up as he deliberately applied
to it the torch of his insolent eyes. He was wearing his old familiar
air of cynical assurance. Evidently, with his recovered fortune, he had
recovered his conviction of his great superiority to the rest of the human
race--the child had climbed back on the chair that made it tall and had
forgotten its tumble. And I was wondering again that I, so short a time
before, had been crude enough to be fascinated and fooled by those tawdry
posings and pretenses. For the man, as I now saw him, was obviously shallow
and vain, a slave to those poor "man-of-the-world" passions--ostentation
and cynicism and skill at vices old as mankind and tedious as a treadmill,
the commonplace routine of the idle and foolish and purposeless. A clever,
handsome fellow, but the more pitiful that he was by nature above the uses
to which he prostituted himself.

He fought hard to keep his eyes steadily on mine; but they would waver and