tear of resinous gum
had caught and hardened in a fork of the branches, and the sun's rays
falling on and through this were concentrated as if by a burning-glass.
The fiery point had stung him.

He broke away the cause of mischief, and then looked about him with
a new understanding. The forest fires had begun, and it was the smoke
which so closed in the view. He could detect now a faintly aromatic
smell of burning, and wondered that he had not noticed it before.

There was not a breath of air stirring, and not a hint of flame in all
the haze which on every side blotted out the far-off hills, and changed
to a dull tint of smoke those which still loomed upon him. At night the
moon hung in the starless sky like a globe of blood, and day by day the
dimness of the air increased. The cloud took no form of cloud, and not
a sound came through it except for the voice of the water, and the
occasional roll and clangour of the trains. The distances in view grew
briefer and more brief, and within a week of the date of his discovery
the nearest peaks were obliterated, and the air had grown pungent with
its charge of invisible burned atoms.

He sat in the midst of this narrowed and darkened world, this world of
silence and solitude, as he sat in the middle of his own despairs. His
life had fallen away to this--an aching heart in a world where no man
came. Had it not been for pride, he could have wept for pity of himself.
Had it not been for a sense of rebellion against fate and the world,
he could have died of his own disdain. He had played the fool, but the
world had taken an unjust advantage of his folly. He loathed himself and
it.

Thus trebly banished--from friends, from the world, from Nature--he
dreamed his dreams. The past came back again.

Paul was keeping shop. The door, rarely passed by the foot of a
customer, stood open to invite the world at large. Armstrong came in
with his spectacles resting on his shaggy brows. Paul, who had been
wool-gathering, went back to nominative, dative, and ablative. He hated
the Eton Latin grammar as he had not learned to hate anything else in
life.

'Any custom?' asked the father.

'Nobody,' said Paul.

'Paul, lad,' said Armstrong, after a lengthy pause. He cleared his
throat, and laid a hand on the boy's shoulder. 'Yell reach your twalth
birthday next week. It's time ye were doing something in the warld.'
He pulled down his glasses and looked at the lad gravely. 'I've tauld
Mester