, and a mob of disconnected questions.
"Oh, by George!" he exclaimed, "what's the worth while of it?" All the
pleasantly estimated assets of life and love and friendship became
unavailable securities in the presence of a mood of depression which came
of breathing air which had lost its vitalizing ozone. And now at a turn
in the road nature fed her child with a freshening change of horizon.

Looking up he saw a hawk in circling flight set against the blue sky. He
never saw this without thinking of Josiah, and then of prisoned things
like a young hawk he had seen sitting dejected in a cage in the barracks.
Did he have dreams of airy freedom? It had affected him as an image of
caged energy--of useless power. With contrasted remembrance he went
back to the guarded procession of boys from the lyceum in France, the
flower-stalls, and the bird-market, the larks singing merrily in their
small wicker cages. Yes, he had them--the two lines he wanted--a poet's
condensed statement of the thought he could not fully phrase:

Ah! the lark!
He hath the heaven which he sings,--
But my poor hawk hath only wings.

The success of the capture of this final perfection of statement of his
own thought refreshed him in a way which is one of the mysteries of that
wild charlatan imagination, who now and then administers tonics to the
weary which are of inexplicable value. John Penhallow felt the sudden
uplift and quickened his pace until he paused within the bastion lines of
the fort. Before him, with her back to him, sat Leila. Her hat lay beside
her finished sketch. She was thinking that John Penhallow, the boy
friend, was to-day in its accepted sense but an acquaintance, of whom she
desired, without knowing why, to know more. That he had changed was
obvious. In fact, he had only developed on the lines of his inherited
character, while in the revolutionary alterations of perfected womanhood
she had undergone a far more radical transformation.

The young woman, whom now he watched unseen, rose and stood on the
crumbling wall. A roughly caressing northwest wind blew back her skirts.
She threw out her wide-sleeved arms in exultant pleasure at the
magnificence of the vast river, with its forest boundaries, and the
rock-ribbed heights of Crow's Nest. As she stood looking "taller than
human," she reminded him of the figure of victory he had seen as a boy
on the stairway of the Louvre. He stood still--again refreshed. The
figure he then saw lived