pped some time before; a strong and increasing wind had
sprung up, which Alan, with knowledge of the wind across his prairies,
recognized as an aftermath of the greater storm that had produced it;
for now the wind was from the opposite direction--from the west. He
could see from the Sherrills' door step, when he looked toward the
lighthouse at the harbor mouth winking red, white, red, white, at him,
that this offshore wind was causing some new commotion and upheaval
among the ice-floes; they groaned and labored and fought against the
opposing pressure of the waves, under its urging.

He went down the steps and to the corner and turned west to Astor
Street. When he reached the house of his father, he stopped under a
street-lamp, looking up at the big, stern old mansion questioningly.
It had taken on a different look for him since he had heard Sherrill's
account of his father; there was an appeal to him that made his throat
grow tight, in its look of being unoccupied, in the blank stare of its
unlighted windows which contrasted with the lighted windows in the
houses on both sides, and in the slight evidences of disrepair about
it. He waited many minutes, his hand upon the key in his pocket; yet
he could not go in, but instead walked on down the street, his thoughts
and feelings in a turmoil.

He could not call up any sense that the house was his, any more than he
had been able to when Sherrill had told him of it. He own a house on
that street! Yet was that in itself any more remarkable than that he
should be the guest, the friend of such people as the Sherrills? No
one as yet, since Sherrill had told him he was Corvet's son, had called
him by name; when they did, what would they call him? Alan Conrad
still? Or Alan Corvet?

He noticed, up a street to the west, the lighted sign of a drug store
and turned up that way; he had promised, he had recollected now, to
write to ... those in Kansas--he could not call them "father" and
"mother" any more--and tell them what he had discovered as soon as he
arrived. He could not tell them that, but he could write them at least
that he had arrived safely and was well. He bought a postcard in the
drug store, and wrote just, "Arrived safely; am well" to John Welton in
Kansas. There was a little vending machine upon the counter, and he
dropped in a penny and got a box of matches and put them in his pocket.

He mailed the card and turned back to Astor Street; and he walked more