Mistah Dare Lane. But you looks powerful bad."

Lane crossed the station platform, and the railroad yard and tracks,
to make a short cut in the direction of his home. He shrank from
meeting any one. He had not sent word just when he would arrive,
though he had written his mother from New York that it would be soon,
He was glad that no one belonging to him had been at the station. He
wanted to see his mother in his home. Walking fast exhausted him, and
he had to rest. How dead his legs felt! In fact he felt queer all
over. The old burn and gnaw in his breast had expanded to a heavy,
full, suffocating sensation. Yet his blood seemed to race. Suddenly an
overwhelming emotion of rapture flooded over him. Home at last! He did
not think of any one. He was walking across the railroad yards where
as a boy he had been wont to steal rides on freight trains. Soon he
reached the bridge. In the gathering twilight he halted to clutch at
the railing and look out across where the waters met--where Sycamore
Creek flowed into Middleville River. The roar of water falling over
the dam came melodiously and stirringly to his ears. And as he looked
again he was assailed by that strange sense of littleness, of
shrunkenness, which had struck him so forcibly at the station. He
listened to the murmur of running water. Then, while the sweetness of
joy pervaded him, there seemed to rise from below or across the river
or from somewhere the same strange misgiving, a keener dread, a chill
that was not in the air, a fatal portent of the future. Why should
this come to mock him at such a sacred and beautiful moment?

Passers-by stared at Lane, and some of them whispered, and one
hesitated, as if impelled to speak. Wheeling away Lane crossed the
bridge, turned up River Street, soon turned off again into a darker
street, and reaching High School Park he sat down to rest again. He