d the misty,
uncertain shapes of trees and bushes gradually evolve themselves into
distinguishable outlines. The process was slow, because a kind of vapor
lay upon everything, and it resisted strenuously the onslaught of the
sun. But it gave way, as darkness ever must before light, and, as if by
magic, the curtain which night had placed was rolled away, and little by
little the landscape was revealed. Along the creek, which ran just
beyond the pike, and parallel with it, hung a dense wall of fog, against
which it seemed the arrows of day fell, blunted. The air was cool and
fresh, and I drew it deep down into my lungs, feeling the sluggish blood
start afresh with each draught.

With the dawning of that day came the dawning of a new life for me. I
realized that I had been living in a darkened room, and that a window
had suddenly been thrown open, letting in upon me a shower of golden
light, with the songs of birds and the incense of flowers. My old life
had been a contented one, had known the pleasures to be derived from
association with books and God's great out-door miracles. The new life,
whose silver dawn was beginning to tip my soul with a strange radiance,
held untold joys which belong rightly to heaven, and which numbed my
mind as I strove blindly after comprehension. I was as a little child
left all at once alone upon the world. I stood, helpless, trying to
centralize my disordered thoughts, with a strange oppressed feeling in
my breast which deep respirations could not drive away. I was deeply,
deeply troubled, and my mind was in a maze. But one idea possessed me,
and that doggedly asserted itself, overriding the tumult in my brain. I
was longing, madly longing, to see again her whom I _loved_. The word in
my mind was like the touch of a white-hot iron, and I started as if
stung, and fell to pacing nervously up and down. It could not be; it
could not be! That child of nineteen,--I a man of forty-five! The idea
was monstrous! What an old fool I had been! I did not know my own mind,
that was all. I would be all right in a day or two. But still that
sinking feeling weighed above my heart, and my usually calm pulse was
rioting with something other than exercise.

"Let it be love!" I cried at last, in my troubled soul. "The painful
bliss of this half hour's experience is worth the cost of denial, for
she shall never know!"

Thus did I, poor worm, commune in my fool's heaven, recking not, nor
knowing, that I was set