all the devotion of which he was capable. There was everything but
energy; the energy of youth which must register itself and cut its name
before it passes. This new feeling was so fresh, so unsatisfied and
light of foot. It ran and was not wearied, anticipated him everywhere.
It put a girdle round the earth while he was going from New York to
Moorlock. At this moment, it was tingling through him, exultant, and
live as quicksilver, whispering, "In July you will be in England."

Already he dreaded the long, empty days at sea, the monotonous Irish
coast, the sluggish passage up the Mersey, the flash of the boat train
through the summer country. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to
the feeling of rapid motion and to swift, terrifying thoughts. He was
sitting so, his face shaded by his hand, when the Boston lawyer saw him
from the siding at White River Junction.

When at last Alexander roused himself, the afternoon had waned to
sunset. The train was passing through a gray country and the sky
overhead was flushed with a wide flood of clear color. There was a
rose-colored light over the gray rocks and hills and meadows. Off to the
left, under the approach of a weather-stained wooden bridge, a group of
boys were sitting around a little fire. The smell of the wood smoke blew
in at the window. Except for an old farmer, jogging along the highroad
in his box-wagon, there was not another living creature to be seen.
Alexander looked back wistfully at the boys, camped on the edge of a
little marsh, crouching under their shelter and looking gravely at their
fire. They took his mind back a long way, to a campfire on a sandbar in
a Western river, and he wished he could go back and sit down with them.
He could remember exactly how the world had looked then.

It was quite dark and Alexander was still thinking of the boys, when it
occurred to him that the train must be nearing Allway. In going to his
new bridge at Moorlock he had always to pass through Allway. The train
stopped at Allway Mills, then wound two miles up the river, and then the
hollow sound under his feet told Bartley that he was on his first bridge
again. The bridge seemed longer than it had ever seemed before, and he
was glad when he felt the beat of the wheels on the solid roadbed again.
He did not like coming and going across that bridge, or remembering the
man who built it. And was he, indeed, the same man who used to walk that
bridge at night, promising such thing