to wear himself out and to settle down into a sort of
quiet despair," thought Sarah as she looked after him. Then lifting her
trowel, she returned with a sigh to the sowing of portulaca seeds in her
rockery.

In the twilight of the mill, where he was hunted through the door by the
scent of flowers, he went over to the shelf of books in a corner, and
taking down the volumes one by one, turned their leaves with a trembling
and eager hand, as though he were seeking some thought so strong, so
steadying, that once having secured it, the rush of his passion would
beat in vain against its impregnable barrier. But the books, like
Sarah, treated life in the grand manner and with the fine detachment of
philosophy. He could get no assistance from them, because they only told
him that he would be happier if he acted always as a rational being, and
this did not help him. They told him, also, in what seemed a burst of
unanimity, that human nature would be better and happier if it were not
human nature, but something else. Some of the writers believed that this
result might be attained by making many laws and some of them were of
the opinion that the way to it was to undo a majority of the laws that
were already made. All admitted that the world was very badly off and
that something must be done, and done very quickly, to relieve it--but
the trouble was that each writer's remedy was different from every other
writer's, and yet each writer's was the imperative, the essential one.
There was a single point on which they agreed, and that was that human
nature would be better and happier if it were different. But poor human
nature, having known this ever since it left the tree-tops, went on,
just the same, being all the time the thing that it was obliged to be.

"There's no help for me here," said Abel, and moving away from the
shelf, he leaned his arms in the window, and looked out on the dripping
wheel and the crooked sycamore, which was decorated with little round
greenish balls of flowers. On the hot agony in his heart the languorous
Southern spring laid a cooling and delicate touch. Beneath the throb
of his pain he felt the stirring of formless, indefinite longings, half
spiritual, half physical, which seemed older and more universal than his
immediate suffering.

For six weeks the canker gnawed at his heart, and he gave no sign of
its presence. Then relief came to him for a few hours one day when he
drifted into a local meeting in