swept the gray, starlit distances which lay between him and
civilization.

He leaned against a great rock, resting his elbows in a carpet of
moss, and his eyes turned into the mystery of those distances. The
sea of spruce-tops that rose out of the ragged valley at his feet
whispered softly in the night wind; from out of their depths
trembled the low hoot of an owl; over the vaster desolation beyond
hovered a weird and unbroken silence. More than once the spirit of
this world had come to him in the night and had roused him from
his slumber to sit alone out under the stars, imagining all that
it might tell him if he could read the voice of it in the
whispering of the trees, if he could but understand it as he
longed to understand it, and could find in it the peace which he
knew that it all but held for him. The spirit of it had never been
nearer to him than to-night. He felt it close to him, so near that
it seemed like the warm, vibrant touch of a presence at his side,
something which had come to him in a voiceless loneliness as great
as his own, watching and listening with him beside the rock. It
seemed nearer to him since he had seen and talked with Gregson. It
was much nearer to him since a few minutes ago, when he had looked
upon what he had first thought to be the face of Eileen Brokaw.

And this was the world--the spirit--that had changed him. He
wondered if Gregson had seen the change which he tried so hard to
conceal. He wondered if Miss Brokaw would see it when she came,
and if her soft, gray eyes would read to the bottom of him as they
had fathomed him once before upon a time which seemed years and
years ago. Thoughts like these troubled him. Twice that day he had
found stealing over him a feeling that was almost physical pain,