free again! He had lost everything! The brand of Cain was upon him! Who was Cain? Where had he heard that phrase, “the brand of Cain”?

And then he came within the shadow of his own home.

He had been busy with his terrible thoughts. He had not been thinking where he was going, not realizing whither his frantic feet were carrying him. Now as he turned the corner sharply, almost knocking over another pedestrian in his flight, he saw the great marble pile ahead of him; its curtained lights, its dim[Pg 23] familiar beauty, its aloofness, its pride, impressed him for the first time. What had he done? Brought down the pride of this great house! Blighted his own life! He did not want to come here! He must not come here! The marble of the walls was as unfriendly and aloof as the marble halls from which he had fled. The cold clarity of the ether still clung to his garments like the aroma of the grave. Why had his feet carried him here where there was no hiding for him, no city of refuge in that costly marble pile? His father and his mother were bitter against him anyway for past offences. Little follies they seemed to him now beside the thing that he had so unwittingly done. Had some devil led him here to show him first what he had lost before it flung him far away from all he had held dear in life?

[Pg 23]

Yet he could not turn another way. It seemed he must go on. And now as he passed the house across the way a shining car drew up and people in evening coats got out and went in, and he remembered. There was to have been a dinner—His mother had begged him to come—Gwendolen Arlington—she was the girl in coral with the silver slippers—A pretty girl—How she would shrink from him now! She must not see him—! He shied around the corner as if some evil power propelled him in vain attempt to get away into some dark cranny of the earth—Gwendolen—She would be sitting at his mother’s table, in his place perhaps, and his chair vacant beside her—Oh, no, his mother would supply some one else—and he perhaps—Where would he be? While the newsboys on the street cried out his name in shame—and his[Pg 24] mother smiled her painted smile, and his father said the glittering sarcasms he was famous for, and he—was out in the cold and dark—forever!

[Pg 24]

Not that he had ever cared particularly for home, until now, when it was taken from him! There had always been a heart hunger for something different. But now that he was suddenly alienated from all he knew it became strangely precious.

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