without thought, without question. If left alone, he and the little girl
whom he had gone that night to see would marry, settle down, and go hand
in hand into old age without questioning love, life, or happiness. And
that was as it should be; and would to Heaven he had been born to tread
the self-same way. There was a day when he was near it; when he turned
the same fresh, frank face fearlessly to the world, when his nature was
as unspoiled and as clean, his hopes as high, and his faith as
child-like; and once when he ran across a passage in Stevenson in which
that gentle student spoke of his earlier and better self as his "little
brother" whom he loved and longed for and sought persistently, but who
dropped farther and farther behind at times, until, in moments of
darkness, he sometimes feared that he might lose him forever--Crittenden
had clung to the phrase, and he had let his fancy lead him to regard
this boy as his early and better self--better far than he had ever
been--his little brother, in a double sense, who drew from him, besides
the love of brother for brother and father for son, a tenderness that
was almost maternal.

The pike-gate slammed now and the swift rush of wheels over the
bluegrass turf followed; the barn-gate cracked sharply on the night air
and Crittenden heard him singing, in the boyish, untrained tenor that is
so common in the South, one of the old-fashioned love-songs that are
still sung with perfect sincerity and without shame by his people:

"You'll never find another love like mine,
"You'll never find a heart that's half so true."

And then the voice was muffled suddenly. A little while later he entered
the yard-gate and stopped in the moonlight and, from his window,
Crittenden looked down and watched him. The boy was going through the