slam and a
snap. He was outside, and the thing he had purposed was accomplished.
He had said good-bye to the house in which he had learned to walk and
talk--the house which had been his home for the whole of his life,
except for a year or two of earliest infancy, and the sound of the
closing door seemed as if it cut his life in two.

He walked rapidly until he reached the ridge before he encountered the
full violence of the storm, for the wind had shifted within the last
hour or two. Then, stalwart as he was, it caught and whirled him and
sent him running willy-nilly for a hundred yards or more. But there was
not a nail in his boots which was not familiar with every acre of that
country-side for a mile or two, and he found the path with ease and
certainty, and ploughed along it as surely as if it had been broad
daylight, though the night was black as a wolf's mouth. The bitter wind
and driving rain were welcome to his hot eyes and scalded face, and he
walked with a swift resolution until he had reached the spot from which
in daylight the last view of the house would have been possible. There
he turned, the waterproof coat whipping about his ankles like a torn
sail, and the rain pattering its own music on his broad shoulders.
Dimly, very dimly, he could see--or perhaps he only thought he saw--the
chimneys of the old home rising against a little clearing in the distant
lift of the sky.

So very brief a while ago he had been happy there. Only an hour or two
since he was meditating, between the moves of the game, on the very
words he meant to use in telling Irene that he loved her. Only an hour
or two since every thought was full of hope and ambition, since the path
of honour stood wide open with a vague bright figure beckoning in its
far distance.

A frost in harvest time will ripen grain, and a great grief will give a
sudden maturity to character. It was a boy who dreamed the happy
dreams of that evening; it was a man who turned his back upon the old
homestead, and set out upon his journey through the world.

He had a seven miles' walk before him, and a black unsheltered night at
the end of it; but he walked as swiftly and as resolutely as if a goal
of comfort had awaited him. When once the hillside was cleared and he
had reached level ground, progress was less difficult, and after the
tremendous tempest of the day the wind gave signs of having blown itself
out. There were pausings and relentings in it, and there wer