came to
his lips, but as he looked into the face before him, he felt it would
be better left unsaid. Instead, he voiced the question that came
uppermost to his mind.

"Why don't you leave--this--and go to school?" he asked abruptly. "You
have an equal chance with the rest. We're each what we make
ourselves."

Landers broke in on him quickly.

"We all like to talk of equality, but in reality we know there is
none. You say 'leave' without the slightest knowledge of what in my
case it means." He gave the collegian a quick look.

"I'm talking as though I'd known you all my life." A question was in
his voice.

"I'm listening," said the man, simply.

"I'll tell you what it means, then. It means that I divorce myself
from everything of Now; that I unlive my past life; that I leave my
companionship with dumb things--horses and cattle and birds--and I
love them, for they are natural. This seems childish to you; but live
with them for years, more than with human beings, and you will
understand.

"More than all else it means that I must become as a stranger to my
family; and they depend upon me. My friends of now would not be my
friends when I returned; they would be as I am to you now--a thing to
be patronized."

He hesitated, and then went recklessly on:

"I've told you so much, I may as well tell you everything. On the next
farm to ours there's a little, brown-eyed girl--Faith's her
name--and--and--" His new-found flow of words failed, and he ended in
unconscious apostrophe:

"To think of growing out of her life, and strange to my father and
mother--it's all so selfish, so hideously selfish!"

"I think I understand," said the soft voice at his side.

They drove on without a word, the frost-bound road ringing under the
horses' feet, the stars above smiling sympathetic indulgence at this
last repetition of the old, old tale of man.

The gentle voice of the collegian broke the silence.

"You say it would be selfish to leave. Is it not right, though, and of
necessity, that we think first of self?" He paused, then boldly
sounded the keynote of the universe.

"Is not selfishness the first law of nature?" he asked.

Landers opened his lips to answer, but closed them without a word.

III

Brown, magnetic Fall, with her overflow of animal activity, shaded
gradually into the white of lethic Winter; then in slow dissolution
relinquished supremacy to the tans and mottled greens of Springtime.
Unsatisfied as m