," said Merrick, going.

II

Merrick had a little place at Riverdale, where he went occasionally to
be near the Iron Works, and where he hid his week-ends when the world
was too much with him.

Here, on the following Saturday afternoon I found him awaiting me in a
pleasant setting of books and prints and faded parental furniture.

We dined late, and smoked and talked afterward in his book-walled study
till the terrier on the hearth-rug stood up and yawned for bed. When
we took the hint and moved toward the staircase I felt, not that I
had found the old Merrick again, but that I was on his track, had come
across traces of his passage here and there in the thick jungle that had
grown up between us. But I had a feeling that when I finally came on the
man himself he might be dead....

As we started upstairs he turned back with one of his abrupt shy
movements, and walked into the study.

"Wait a bit!" he called to me.

I waited, and he came out in a moment carrying a limp folio.

"It's typewritten. Will you take a look at it? I've been trying to get
to work again," he explained, thrusting the manuscript into my hand.

"What? Poetry, I hope?" I exclaimed.

He shook his head with a gleam of derision. "No--just general
considerations. The fruit of fifty years of inexperience."

He showed me to my room and said good-night.

*****

The following afternoon we took a long walk inland, across the hills,
and I said to Merrick what I could of his book. Unluckily there wasn't
much to say. The essays were judicious, polished and cultivated; but
they lacked the freshness and audacity of his youthful work. I tried
to conceal my opinion behind the usual generalisations, but he broke
through these feints with a quick thrust to the heart of my meaning.

"It's worn down--blurred? Like the figures in the Cumnors' tapestry?"

I hesitated. "It's a little too damned resigned," I said.

"Ah," he exclaimed, "so am I. Resigned." He switched the bare brambles
by the roadside. "A man can't serve two masters."

"You mean business and literature?"

"No; I mean theory and instinct. The gray tree and the green. You've
got to choose which fruit you'll try; and you don't know till afterward
which of the two has the dead core."

"How can anybody be sure that only one of them has?"

"I'm sure," said Merrick sharply.

We turned back to the subject of his essays, and I was astonished at
the detachment with which he criticised and