is old friends, the books; he could
order a dinner to-morrow that would satisfy even his palate,--and he
used to be an epicure. He ought to go. He would go.

He walked up the open path leading to the house. Then he stopped, turned
and struck directly through the trees and bushes to the river-side. The
boat was at some distance: he called once or twice for her to come and
take him on board before she heard him. His voice sounded hoarse and
strange to himself: he did not know himself in what he did. As for the
world, there was nothing in it but that boat yonder which shot through
the water, and the woman with eager face rowing swiftly toward him.

There was not a Wall-street banker or a politician among Neckart's
confreres who would not have looked upon him as insane for the moment.
This dull wisp of a woman to blot out all business, power, place, from
his life? But, after all, there is no insanity so practical or
long-lived. Why does A bull and bear the market, or B sell himself and
his party, but for the sake of some ugly, faded woman and the
commonplace children she has borne him? They are not thought worth
notice by anybody but himself, but he ignores honesty, death, God
himself, for them his life long. A plodding, shrewd fellow too, probably
not a whit heroic.

Neckart was tramping along the common road which all of us know, but it
seemed to him that he was breaking ground in a new world full of misty
splendors and untried action. When he called to her his breath failed
him, as it used to do when he was a boy wild with excitement. The sand
under his feet, the brambles on the bank, the overarching sky, were not
the same they were an hour ago. When the boat darted up to the shore,
rocking as she held it fast with the oar, it seemed strange to him that
she should speak in her ordinary tone. Did she not know?

She stood up in the bow steadying the skiff as he sprang into it. His
hand touched her fingers for an instant, and she noticed that it shrank
from hers.

"Did my father call me?"

"No: I wanted to talk to you alone."

She pushed from shore and dipped her oars: in a moment they were out in
the current. It was a rippling belt of steely blue, the banks making
indistinguishable ramparts of shadow on either side. Overhead was the
soft starless twilight of June, through which a nighthawk flapped
heavily and vanished. When it was gone they were alone. Could she not
understand that they were alone? In this wide dar