thoroughly; perhaps it would have been better to have written.

He bought an evening journal, but he could not read it. What he read
between the lines was his own life. What a miserable failure! What a
mess he had made of his own affairs, and how unworthy of such a woman as
Edith he had been! How indifferent he had been to her happiness in the
pursuit of his own pleasure! How would she receive him? He could
hardly doubt that; but she must know, she must have felt cruelly his
estrangement. What if she met him with a royal forgiveness, as if he
were a returned prodigal? He couldn't stand that. If now he were only
going back with his fortune recovered, with brilliant prospects to
spread before her, and could come into the house in his old playful
manner, with the assumed deference of the master, and say: "Well, Edith
dear, the storm is over. It's all right now. I am awfully glad to get
home. Where's the rascal of an heir?"

Instead of that, he was going with nothing, humiliated, a clerk in a
twine-store. And not much of a clerk at that, he reflected, with his
ready humorous recognition of the situation.

And yet he was for the first time in his life earning his living. Edith
would like that. He had known all along that his idle life had been a
constant grief to her. No, she would not reproach him; she never did
reproach him. No doubt she would be glad that he was at work. But, oh,
the humiliation of the whole thing! At one moment he was eager to see
her, and the next the rattling train seemed to move too fast, and he
welcomed every wayside stop that delayed his arrival. But even the Long
Island trains arrive some time, and all too soon the cars slowed up at
the familiar little station, and Jack got out.

"Quite a stranger in these parts, Mr. Delancy," was the easy salutation
of the station-keeper.

"Yes. I've been away. All right down here?"

"Right as a trivet. Hot summer, though. Calculate it's goin' to be a
warm fall--generally is."

It was near sunset. When the train had moved on, and its pounding on the
rails became a distant roar and then was lost altogether, the country
silence so impressed Jack, as he walked along the road towards the sea,
that he became distinctly conscious of the sound of his own footsteps.
He stopped and listened. Yes, there were other sounds--the twitter of
birds in the bushes by the roadside, the hum of insects, and the faint
rhythmical murmur of lapsing waves on the shore.

And now