the most part of that first winter in town his life, outside the
office, was the life of the boarding house in downtown Third Street; the
life of slovenly but highly respectable women with a penchant for cheap
gossip; of bickerings overheard through division walls; of disappointed
men who should, they were assured, if life stood on all fours with
justice, be dwelling in their own houses. In short, it was the dreary
existence of unalleviated obscurity.

But to Boone it was something else. In his third-floor room was a window
and a gas jet.

The window looked across to another world where, behind a fine old
sycamore that took on alluring colour of bole and bark and leaf, stood a
club through whose colonial doors men like Morgan Wallifarro went in and
out.

At night too that mean room was to him sanctuary, for then there was the
gas jet, and the gas jet stood, to a cabin-bred boy, for adventuring
into all the world of literature of which McCalloway had talked.

Boone had the list written down, and the public library had the books.

So while the couple in the next room debated the question of separation
and divorce, their voices carrying stridently through lath and plaster,
Boone was ranging the world with Darwin, with Suetonius and his "Lives
of the Caesars," with the whole bright-panoplied crew: Plutarch,
Thackeray, Dumas, Stevenson, Macaulay, and Kipling.

Then, too, there were visits to the jail where a kinsman lay in durance.
But when summer came he heaved a sigh of vast relief.

As the train took him back through flat beargrass and swelling
bluegrass, through the beginnings of the hills, where he saw the first
log booms in the rivers--his heart seemed to expand and his lungs to
broaden out and drink deep where they had been only sipping before.

Dutifully and promptly upon his arrival at the McCalloway cabin, Boone
went over to see Happy, and as he drew near, for all the assurance of a
courage, by no means brittle, he halted in the road and braced himself
before he crossed the stile.

To go there was something of an ordeal. To stay away, without making the
effort, would leave him guiltily recreant to an old friendship which, on
one side, had been love.

"It's Boone Wellver. Can I come in?" he shouted from the road, and
Cyrus, who looked aged and hunched his shoulders more dejectedly than of
old, rose slowly from his hickory-withed chair on the porch and stood
upright.

At first he did not speak. Indeed, h