seback, down in the Square,
pointed Westward; but there was no West, in that sense, any more.
There was still South America; perhaps he could find something
below the Isthmus. Here the sky was like a lid shut down over the
world; his mother could see saints and martyrs behind it.

Well, in time he would get over all this, he supposed. Even his
father had been restless as a young man, and had run away into a
new country. It was a storm that died down at last,--but what a
pity not to do anything with it! A waste of power--for it was a
kind of power; he sprang to his feet and stood frowning against
the ruddy light, so deep in his struggling thoughts that he did
not notice a man, mounting from the lower terraces, who stopped
to look at him.

The stranger scrutinized Claude with interest. He saw a young man
standing bareheaded on the long flight of steps, his fists
clenched in an attitude of arrested action,--his sandy hair, his
tanned face, his tense figure copper-coloured in the oblique
rays. Claude would have been astonished if he could have known
how he seemed to this stranger.

II

The next morning Claude stepped off the train at Frankfort and
had his breakfast at the station before the town was awake. His
family were not expecting him, so he thought he would walk home
and stop at the mill to see Enid Royce. After all, old friends
were best.

He left town by the low road that wound along the creek. The
willows were all out in new yellow leaves, and the sticky
cotton-wood buds were on the point of bursting. Birds were
calling everywhere, and now and then, through the studded willow
wands, flashed the dazzling wing of a cardinal.

All over the dusty, tan-coloured wheatfields there was a tender
mist of green,--millions of little fingers reaching up and waving
lightly in the sun. To the north and south Claude could see the
corn-planters, moving in straight lines over the brown acres
where the earth had been harrowed so fine that it blew off in
clouds of dust to the roadside. When a gust of wind rose, gay
little twisters came across the open fields, corkscrews of
powdered earth that whirled through the air and suddenly fell
again. It seemed as if there were a lark on every fence post,
singing for everything that was dumb; for the great ploughed
lands, and the heavy horses in the rows, and the men guiding the
horses.

Along the roadsides, from under the dead weeds and wisps of dried
bluestem, the dandelions thr