or two
young men near his own age, but he kept so far aloof from them that they
had long since ceased to seek him out. He kept away from Doctor
Brinkerhoff, fearing talk of Iris, or some new complication, and even
the postmaster's kindly sallies fell upon deaf ears. He, too, missed
Iris, and often inquired for her, though he could not have failed to
note that no letters came for Lynn.

Almost in the first of the hurt, when it seemed the hardest to bear, he
had wondered whether it could be any worse if Iris were dead. All at
once, he knew that it would be; that the cold hand and the quiet heart
were the supreme anguish of loving, because there was no longer any
possibility of change. Swiftly, he understood how Iris had felt when
Aunt Peace died and he stood by, indifferent and unmoved.

In tardy atonement, he covered the grave in the churchyard with
flowers--the goldenrod and purple aster that marched side by side over
the hills to meet the frost, gay and fearless to the last.

He saw himself as he had been then, and his heart grew hot with shame.
"I don't wonder she called me a clod," he said to himself, "for that is
what I was."

In the maze of darkness through which he somehow lived, there was but
one ray of comfort--the Master. Lynn felt, vaguely, that here was
something upon which he might lean. He did not perceive that it was his
own individuality which Herr Kaufmann had in some way awakened, so prone
are we to confuse the person with the thing, the thought with the deed.

Day after day, he tramped over the hills around East Lancaster; day by
day, footsore and weary, he sought for peace along those sunlit fields.
At night, desperately tired and faint with hunger, he crept home, where
he slept uneasily, waking always with that hand of terror clutching at
his heart.

He went most frequently to the pile of rocks in the woods, a mile or
more from the house. There were no signs upon the bare earth around it;
seemingly no one went there but Lynn. Yet the suggestion of an altar was
openly made, from the wide ledge at the foundation, where one might
kneel, to the cross at the summit, rude, stern, and forbidding,
chiselled in the rock.

Here, many times, Lynn had found comfort. Someone else, whose heart
swelled, burned, and tried to escape, had cut that cross upon the
granite. Thus he came, by slow degrees, into an intimate, invisible
companionship.

Herr Kaufmann had ceased to speak of lessons, though Lynn went