off to meet the girl at White Sulphur.

I worked right hard that summer, but I missed him, and I surely was
glad when he came back. Something was wrong; I saw it at once. He did
not mention her name, and for a while he avoided even me. I sought him
then, and gradually I got him into our old habit of walking up into the
Gap and of sitting out after supper on a big rock in the valley,
listening to the run of the river and watching the afterglow over the
Cumberland, the moon rise over Wallen's Ridge and the stars come out.
Waiting for him to speak, I learned for the first time then another
secret of his wretched melancholy. It was the hopelessness of that
time, perhaps, that disclosed it. Grayson had lost the faith of his
childhood. Most men do that at some time or other, but Grayson had no
business, no profession, no art in which to find relief. Indeed, there
was but one substitute possible, and that came like a gift straight
from the God whom he denied. Love came, and Grayson's ideals of love,
as of everything else, were morbid and quixotic. He believed that he
owed it to the woman he should marry never to have loved another. He
had loved but one woman, he said, and he should love but one. I
believed him then literally when he said that his love for the Kentucky
girl was his religion now--the only anchor left him in his sea of
troubles, the only star that gave him guiding light. Without this
love, what then?

I had a strong impulse to ask him, but Grayson shivered, as though he
divined my thought, and, in some relentless way, our talk drifted to
the question of suicide. I was not surprised that he rather defended
it. Neither of us said anything new, only I did not like the way he
talked. He was too deliberate, too serious, as though he were really
facing a possible fact. He had no religious scruples, he said, no
family ties; he had nothing to do with bringing himself into life;
why--if it was not worth living, not bearable--why should he not end
it? He gave the usual authority, and I gave the usual answer.
Religion aside, if we did not know that we were here for some purpose,
we did not know that we were not; and here we were anyway, and our duty
was plain. Desertion was the act of a coward, and that Grayson could
not deny.

That autumn the crash of '91 came across the water from England, and
Grayson gave up. He went to Richmond, and came back with money enough
to pay off his notes, and I think it