alf shut eyes, and
after the day's hot communion with old wrongs, he felt a sudden peace.
He was at the turn; the brute within him quiet behind the eternal bars;
the savage receding, the man beckoning, the after man watching from
afar. The inner stage was cleared and set for a new act. He had lowered
the light, he had rested, and he had filled the interval with forms and
determinations beautiful and vague, vague as the mists, the sounds, the
tossed arms of the Ossian he had dared to open last night, before his
father, by the camp-fire of the mountaineers. In the twilight of his
theatre he rested; a shadowy figure, full of mysteries, full of
possibilities, a boy in the grasp of the man within him, neither boy
nor man unlovable, nor wholly unadmirable, both seen, and seeing,
"through a glass darkly."

He turned on his side, and the light went up sharply. A man riding a
beautiful and spirited horse was coming over the hilltop. Horse and
rider paused a moment upon the crest, standing clear against the eastern
sky. In the crystal air and the sunset glow they crowned the hill like a
horse and rider nobly done in bronze. A moment thus, then they began to
pick their way down the rocky road. Lewis Rand looked, and started to
his feet. That horse had been bred in Albemarle, and that horseman he
had met in Richmond. The boy's heart beat fast and the colour surged to
his cheek. There was little, since the hour in the bookshop, that he
would not have done or suffered for the approaching figure. All along
the road from Richmond his imagination had conjured up a score of
fantastic instances, in each of which he had rescued, or died for, or
had in some impossibly romantic and magnificent fashion been the
benefactor of the man who was drawing near to the river and camp-fire.
As superbly generous as any other youth, he was, at present, in his
progress through life, in the land of shrines. He must have his idol,
must worship and follow after some visible hero, some older, higher,
stronger, more subtle-fine and far-ahead adventurer. Heretofore, in his
limited world, Adam Gaudylock had seemed nearest the gates of escape.
But Adam, he thought, was of the woods and the earth, even as his father
was, and as the tobacco was, and as he himself was. His enormous need
was for some one to follow whose feet were above the fat, red fields and
the leafy trails. All this was present with him as he watched the
oncoming figure. Great men kept their word.