ed? Foiled, he tore and rent
me....

One morning I rode up through the shady canon, fragrant with bay, to the
open slopes stained smoky-blue by the wild lilac, where the twisted
madrona grows. As I sat gazing down on tiny headlands jutting out into a
vast ocean my paralyzing indecision came to an end. I turned my horse
down the trail again. I had seen at last that life was bigger than I,
bigger than Maude, bigger than our individual wishes and desires. I felt
as though heavy shackles had been struck from me. As I neared the house I
spied my young doctor in the garden path, his hands in his pockets
watching a humming-bird poised over the poppies. He greeted me with a
look that was not wholly surprise at my early return, that seemed to have
in it something of gladness.

"Strafford," I said, "I've made up my mind to go to Europe."

"I have been thinking for some time, Mr. Paret," he replied, "that a
sea-voyage is just what you need to set you on your feet."

I started eastward the next morning, arriving in New York in time to
catch one of the big liners sailing for Havre. On my way across the
continent I decided to send a cable to Maude at Paris, since it were only
fair to give her an opportunity to reflect upon the manner in which she
would meet the situation. Save for an impatience which at moments I
restrained with difficulty, the moods that succeeded one another as I
journeyed did not differ greatly from those I had experienced in the past
month. I was alternately exalted and depressed; I hoped and doubted and
feared; my courage, my confidence rose and fell. And yet I was aware of
the nascence within me of an element that gave me a stability I had
hitherto lacked: I had made my decision, and I felt the stronger for it.

It was early in March. The annual rush of my countrymen and women for
foreign shores had not as yet begun, the huge steamer was far from
crowded. The faint throbbing of her engines as she glided out on the
North River tide found its echo within me as I leaned on the heavy rail
and watched the towers of the city receding in the mist; they became
blurred and ghostlike, fantastic in the grey distance, sad, appealing
with a strange beauty and power. Once the sight of them, sunlit, standing
forth sharply against the high blue of American skies, had stirred in me
that passion for wealth and power of which they were so marvellously and
uniquely the embodiment. I recalled the bright day of my home-coming wi