home. How could he ever meet them, ever tell them? How would they
ever understand? If he could only say to his father: "I have sinned
and I have broken your heart: but forgive me." But he could not say
this: he did not believe that he had done wrong. Yet all that he
would now have to show in their eyes would be the year of his
wasted life, and a trunk full of the books that had ruined him.

Ah, those two years before he had started to college, during which
they had lived happily together! Their pride in him! their self-
denial, affection--all because he was to be a scholar and a
minister!

He fancied he could see them as they sat in the house this moment,
not dreaming he was anywhere near. One on each side of the
fireplace; his mother wearing her black dress and purple shawl: a
ball of yarn and perhaps a tea-cake in her lap; some knitting on
her needles; she knit, she never mended. But his father would be
mending--leather perhaps, and sewing, as he liked to sew, with hog
bristles--the beeswax and the awls lying in the bottom of a chair
drawn to his side. There would be no noises in the room otherwise:
he could hear the stewing of the sap in the end of a fagot, the
ticking of one clock, the fainter ticking of another in the
adjoining room, like a disordered echo. They would not be talking;
they would be thinking of him. He shut his eyes, compressed his
lips, shook his head resolutely, and leaped down.

He had gone about twenty yards, when he heard a quick, incredulous
bark down by the house and his dog appeared in full view, looking
up that way, motionless. Then he came on running and barking
resentfully, and a short distance off stopped again.