clay-chinked chimney and its invariable congress of lean chickens and leaner dogs. Now and then a commotion along the track drew his attention to a scurrying, squealing drove of pigs racing out of danger. Then for a time the woods closed in again, and presently the train slowed down before a small station. Winthrop reached tentatively toward his bag, but at that instant the sign came into sight, “Cowper,” he read, and settled back again.

[46]

[47]

[47]

Apparently none boarded the train and none got off, and presently the journey began once more. The conductor entered, glanced at Winthrop, decided that he didn’t look communicative and so sat himself down in the corner and leisurely bit the corner off a new plug of tobacco.

The fields came into sight again, and once a comfortable-looking residence gazed placidly down at the passing train from the crest of a nearby hill. But Winthrop saw without seeing. His thoughts were reviewing once more the chain of circumstances which had led link by link to the present moment. His thoughts went no further back than that painful morning nearly two years before when he had discovered Gerald Potter huddled over his desk, a revolver beside him on the floor, and his face horrible with the stains of blood and of ink from the overturned ink-stand. They had been friends ever since college days, Gerald and he, and the shock had never quite left him. During the subsequent work of disentangling the affairs[48] of the firm the thing haunted him like a nightmare, and when the last obligation had been discharged, Winthrop’s own small fortune going with the rest, he had broken down completely. Nervous prostration, the physician called it. Looking back at it now Winthrop had a better name for it, and that was, Hell. There had been moments when he feared he would die, and interminable nights when he feared he wouldn’t, when he had cried like a baby and begged to be put out of misery. There had been two months of that, and then they had bundled him off to a sanitarium in the Connecticut hills. There he, who a few months before had been a strong, capable man of thirty-eight, found himself a weak, helpless, emaciated thing with no will of his own, a mere sleeping and waking automaton, more interested in watching the purple veins on the backs of his thin hands than aught else in his limited world. At times he could have wept weakly from self-pity.

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But that, too, had passed. One sparkling[49] September 

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