ell
farther away, then it ceased. The wind was quite crisp and cool, and
it smote his back from the northwest. He could smell wild-grapes and
the pungent odor of decaying leaves. The autumn was beginning, and
over his thoughts, raised like a ghost from the ashes of the summer,
stole a vague vision of the winter. He saw for a second the driving
slant of the snow-storm over the old drifting road, he saw the white
slant of Sylvia's house-roof through it. And at the same time a
curious, pleasant desire, which might be primitive and coeval with
the provident passion of the squirrels and honey-bees, thrilled him.
Then he dismissed it bitterly. What need of winter-stores and
provisions for sweet home-comfort in the hearts of freezing storms
was there for him? What did he care whether or not he laid in stores
of hearth-wood, of garden produce, of apples, just for himself in his
miserable solitude? The inborn desire of Northern races at the
approach of the sterile winters, containing, as do all desires to
insure their fulfilment, the elements of human pleasure, failed
suddenly to move him when he remembered that his human life, in one
sense, was over.

[Illustration: "He remained there motionless"]

Opposite him across the road, in an old orchard, was a tree full of
apples. The low sun struck them, and they showed spheres of rosy
orange, as brilliant as Atalanta's apples of gold, against the
background of dark violet clouds. Barney looked at this tree, which
was glorified for the time almost out of its common meaning as a
tree, as he might have looked at a gorgeous procession passing before
him, while his mind was engrossed with his own misery, seeming to
project before his eyes like a veil.

Presently it grew dusky, and the glowing apples faded; the town-clock
struck eight. Barney counted the strokes; then he arose and went
slowly back. He had not gone far when he saw at a distance down the
road a man and woman strolling slowly towards him. They disappeared
suddenly, and he thought they had turned into a lane which opened
upon the road just there. He thought to himself, and with no concern,
that it might have been his sister Rebecca--something about the
woman's gait suggested her--and William Berry. He knew that William
was not allowed in his mother's house, and that he and Rebecca met
outside. He looked up the dusky lane when he came to it, but he saw
nobody.

When he reached Sylvia Crane's house he noticed that the fron