an in the
world"--singing themselves wildly within her, were changing the world
for her. Through all the future years, she did not know it then, she was
to see herself as some other person, the person who had sprung into
glorious being when Nort had called her Anthy. She looked only once at
her face--she could not bear more of it--and then threw herself on her
bed, burying her burning cheeks in her pillow, and lay thus for a long,
long time.

All of this Fergus could not know about, and it is possible that if he
had known about it he would still have misinterpreted it. Like many an
excellent older person he suspected that youth was not sufficient to its
own problems.

Nort never knew, while he stood there at the gate looking up at the dark
house into which Anthy had disappeared, how near he was to feeling
Fergus's wiry hands upon his throat. But Fergus held himself in, his
grim mind made up, considering how best he should do what he had to do.

I suppose life is tragic, or comic, or merely humdrum, as you happen to
look at it. If you are old and sour, you will see little in the rages
of youth, they will appear to you excessively absurd and enormously
distant. You will probably not recall that you yourself, in your time,
were a moderately great fool, or, if you were not a fool, you have
missed----What have you _not_ missed?

Nort could never remember exactly what he did next. He recalls rushing
through shadowy roads, with the cool, sharp air of the night biting his
hot face. He remembers standing somewhere on a hilltop and looking up at
the wonderful blue bowl of the sky all lit with stars. He could remember
talking aloud, but not what it was that he said, only that it came out
of the vast tumult within him. From time to time he would see with
incomparable vividness Anthy's face looking up at him, he would hear,
actually _hear_, his own thick voice speaking; every minute detail of
the moment, every sight, sound, odour, would pass before him in flashes
of consciousness. He would live over the entire evening, as it seemed to
him, in a moment of time. He did not know that the world could be so
beautiful; he did not imagine that he himself was like that!

At its height emotion seems endless and indestructible, but it is, in
its very nature, brief and elusive--else men might die of it. Nort's
mood began finally to quiet down, the impressions and memories of the
night rushed less wildly through his mind. And suddenly--he