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'Well, don't go 'way mad, looks like it was going to freeze, don't it,' was the parting sally, which his mind repeated to his hurried steps down the dry road.

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The wind was dying before the sunset, but had chilled, turning up the under sides of leaves. Trees shivered under a dulled sky. The evening, muted by wind and cold, given a sullen swiftness of animation, mated the feeling of Richard Milne. After a week of torrid weather in which the very sky seemed to melt, rain should have come to sweeten the smell of ripening grain and whitened clods. But first this dry cold, in which trees writhed blanching, while now and again a cricket chirping up fitfully made still greater the removal from the sultry quietude proper to the time and season.

Once more the man was overcome by a sense of strangeness. He had been in his office that morning, had walked and taxied in the streets of the city and left it at noon, riding through unforgettable miles of railway yards and factories and grimy suburbs. And already he could make himself believe in the existence of such things only with an effort. For all the years in which he had struggled for success there, it seemed that the only real and personal part of his life had been lived here, surrounded by trees, fields, river, which claimed him as though he had never left them. He did not need to look at this house or hedge or vista for a landmark, because he could have believed that he had walked down this road every night for the past year. And accompanying the return upon him bodily of the old life was the same sense of futility and uncertainty which he had known in those times—the cause of his eventual determination to leave, and also of his periodic returns. And with every step he was approaching nearer the source of that uncertainty.