inuing his stern progress straight through
the barn-yard gate, and thence onward until he found himself in solitude
upon the far side of a smoke-house, where his hauteur vanished.

Here, in the shade of a great walnut-tree which sheltered the little
building, he gave way--not to tears, certainly, but to faint murmurings
and little heavings under impulses as ancient as young love itself. It
is to be supposed that William considered his condition a lonely one,
but if all the seventeen-year-olds who have known such halfhours could
have shown themselves to him then, he would have fled from the mere
horror of billions. Alas! he considered his sufferings a new invention
in the world, and there was now inspired in his breast a monologue so
eloquently bitter that it might deserve some such title as A Passion
Beside the Smoke-house. During the little time that William spent in
this sequestration he passed through phases of emotion which would have
kept an older man busy for weeks and left him wrecked at the end of
them.

William's final mood was one of beautiful resignation with a kick in
it; that is, he nobly gave her up to George and added irresistibly that
George was a big, fat lummox! Painting pictures, such as the billions
of other young sufferers before him have painted, William saw himself
a sad, gentle old bachelor at the family fireside, sometimes making the
sacrifice of his reputation so that SHE and the children might never
know the truth about George; and he gave himself the solace of a fierce
scene or two with George: "Remember, it is for them, not you--you
THING!"

After this human little reaction he passed to a higher field of romance.
He would die for George and then she would bring the little boy she had
named William to the lonely headstone--Suddenly William saw himself in
his true and fitting character--Sydney Carton! He had lately read A Tale
of Two Cities, immediately re-reading until, as he would have said,
he "knew it by heart"; and even at the time he had seen resemblances
between himself and the appealing figure of Carton. Now that the
sympathy between them was perfected by Miss Pratt's preference for
another, William decided to mount the scaffold in place of George
Crooper. The scene became actual to him, and, setting one foot upon a
tin milk-pail which some one had carelessly left beside the smoke-house,
he lifted his eyes to the pitiless blue sky and unconsciously assumed
the familiar attitude of C