along distraught and puzzled. In a way he felt like a man capable of
taking a man's place in life and in another way he didn't at all.

The country spread out, wide, in all directions. It was always night
when he walked thus and he could not see, but the realization of
distances was always with him. "Everything goes on and on but I stand
still," he thought. He had been a professor in the little college for
six years. Young men and women had come into a room and he had taught
them. It was nothing. Words and figures had been played with. An effort
had been made to arouse minds.

For what?

There was the old question, always coming back, always wanting
answering as a little animal wants food. Hugh gave up trying to answer.
He walked rapidly, trying to grow physically tired. He made his mind
attend to little things in the effort to forget distances. One night he
got out of the road and walked completely around a cornfield. He
counted the stalks in each hill of corn and computed the number of
stalks in a whole field. "It should yield twelve hundred bushels of
corn, that field," he said to himself dumbly, as though it mattered to
him. He pulled a little handful of cornsilk out of the top of an ear of
corn and played with it. He tried to fashion himself a yellow
moustache. "I'd be quite a fellow with a trim yellow moustache," he
thought.

One day in his class-room Hugh suddenly began to look with new interest
at his pupils. A young girl attracted his attention. She sat beside the
son of a Union Valley merchant and the young man was writing something
on the back of a book. She looked at it and then turned her head away.