hat it was infinitely greater or
infinitely less than his usual intelligence. He simply went on, thinking
nothing, remembering nothing. The beautiful highway, arched by great
trees, above which rode the moon in keeping pace with him, was a tunnel
under a luminous sea; he half walked, half floated, in the crystal
water, and had no wonder that he breathed it. The houses along the way
were the palaces of lordly gnomes that inhabited the deep.

Whatever was leading him turned him out of the avenue at last and
drifted him along a winding road that was as beautiful in its less
conventional way. He did not reflect that all of this was familiar,
shamefully familiar. It was the road to his grandmother's but he had not
visited her for a year.

Her great wisdom and tact had gone to a study of the strange, unhappy
child; she had been kind to him in every cautious, delicate fashion that
she could devise; but he had ceased coming, and avoided her when she
visited his home, and she had never known why. She was a patient woman
and good; she knew prayer, and in her peaceful twilight she walked with
God; yet no revelation had come at her appeals, for the times were not
ready; and the boy went his way alone and silent, forever alone and
silent, and unhappy, unhappy!

A white picket fence was presently marching with him alongside the
shining road. He did not consciously recognize it, and it brought no
rekindling of an old terror, an old shame; but soon, on the other side
of it, a distance away, there broke on the stillness a challenge that he
remembered, and its tone was contempt. He understood it, and woke with
a start because of a sudden fluff of flame and a whiff of smoke from the
grass fire of ten years ago, and the ache in his throat gave him a
strangling wrench. His head rolled; the moon swung through an arc of
alarming length. That call beyond the fence struck the dominant note of
his life, and it was Fear. Yet it came from a mere animal,--his
grandmother's old buckskin horse, the most docile of creatures.

Ray had never feared the wild things of the woods. The cry of the
panther in the dead of night is dreadful but it had no terrors for the
boy in the forest solitude. Other fierce pad-footed members of the cat
tribe had come and sniffed him as he lay under the stars, and experience
had taught him to feign sleep, for a suspicion of his wakefulness would
send them bounding away, and he was lonely, always lonely. One night,
roused