might be of some value to you,"
said Miss Burns.

But he much preferred to prove it to her.

"Perhaps you think it is a whim in me or a piece of foolishness. Yet, the
way I am constituted, it is practically impossible for me to do anything
for my sake alone. Your sympathy would act as a stimulus to keep me to my
resolution." He drew from his pocket a letter from Peter Schmidt, saying
that near Meriden there was a frame house that would be suitable for
Frederick. Evidently his plan to retire to rural solitude was by no means
a recent one. "When I come to myself in the quiet of the country, and I
have reason to hope I will come to myself, you will hear from me. From
time to time the world learns of a man of about thirty who suddenly
disappears, leaving his family, his wife and his children in ignorance of
his whereabouts. Sometimes he is a statesman, sometimes a young professor
in a university, sometimes a mayor in good standing with all the citizens
of his town, sometimes a rich business man enjoying the respect of the
community. He leaves most unceremoniously, without concerning himself for
the affairs of importance, even of extreme importance, that he may have
to attend to the next day, perhaps the very next hour. He obeys the iron
impulse to throw off the entire world, his next of kin, his dearest
friends, and be alone with himself, so alone that he passes into oblivion
and may even count as dead. It is a similar state, though perhaps not so
pathologic in its character, a state conditioned rather by strokes of
fortune, that has uprooted me. Don't forget, all social connections
signify an immense consumption of nerve force and attach a person to his
surroundings by a thousand threads and fibres. Ingigerd Hahlstroem is not
the only one that is enmeshed and throttled in a spider's web. Every now
and then all of us have to pant for air and tear away wrappings. Then the
moment comes when we no longer do the thing that has been well
considered, the thing that convention has established, but the very thing
that has not been considered, that takes heed of nothing, the purely
instinctive thing. Call it what you will, fermentation, folly, passion,
shipwreck, storm. Whatever it may be, the fact is, all at once a man
again feels the desire for life expanding his lungs."

Frederick now drew from his pocket the photographs of his three children,
which his father and mother had sent along with their letters. In their
great happin