e shouted.

The clergyman looked back once as the train moved out of the
station. The head was there, uncovered, but still shouting.

"No durned----"

He saw the gray hat waved wildly, but the voice was ravished from
him by the wind of the train.

II

The train reached Little Sutton at seven. Just as he had traveled
third-class, so he had preposterously planned to send his luggage on
by carrier, and plod the five miles between town and station on
foot. He wanted to keep up the illusion.

The station, anyhow, was all right. They had enlarged it a bit, but
it was still painted a dirty drab (perhaps there used to be a shade
more yellow ochre in the drab), and the Virginian creeper still
climbed over the station master's box, veiling him as in a bower. If
he could have swallowed up time (fifteen years of it) as the New
York and Chicago Express swallowed up space, he might have felt
himself a young man again, a limp young man, slightly the worse for
drink, handed down to the porter like a portmanteau by the friendly
arm of a fellow-passenger, on one of those swift, sudden, and
ill-timed returns that preceded his last great exodus. Only that,
whereas Stephen Lepper at thirty-nine was immaculately attired, the
coat of that unfortunate young man hung by a thread or two, and his
trousers by a button; while, instead of five million dollars piled
at his back, he had but eighteenpence (mostly copper) lying loose in
his front pockets. But Stephen Lepper had grown so used to his
clothes and his millions that he carried them unconsciously. They
offered no violence to the illusion. What might have destroyed it
was the strange, unharmonizing fact that he was sober. But he had
got used to being sober, too.

The road unrolled itself for two miles over the pale green downs. It
topped the spine of a little hog-backed hill and dipped toward the
town (road all right). To his left, on the crest of the hill, stood
the old landmark, three black elms in a field that was rased and
bleached after the hay-harvest. They leaned toward each other, and
between their trunks the thick blue-gray sky showed solid as paint
(landmark all right).

In the queer deep light that was not quite twilight things were
immobile and distinct, as if emphasizing their outlines before
losing them. The illusion was acute, almost intolerable.

Down there lay the town, literally buried in the wooded combe. Slabs
of gray wall and purple roof, sunk in the black-g