Human life does not move with the regularity of a clock. In living
there are gaps and silences when the soul stands still in its flight
through abysses-and then there come times of trial and times of
struggle when we grow old without knowing it. Body and soul
change appallingly.

Seven years of hard, busy life had made changes in Will.

His face had grown bold, resolute, and rugged, some of its delicacy
and all of its boyish quality gone. His figure was stouter, erect as
of old, but less graceful. He bore himself like a man accustomed to
look out for himself in all kinds of places. It was only at times that
there came into his deep eyes a preoccupied, almost sad look that
showed kinship with his old self.

This look was on his face as he walked toward the clump of trees
on the right of the road.

He reached the grove of popple trees and made his way at once to
the spring. When he saw it, it gave him a shock. They had let it fill
up with leaves and dirt.

Overcome by the memories of the past, he flung him-sell down on
the cool and shadowy bank, and gave him-sell up to the bittersweet
reveries of a man returning to his boyhood's home. He was filled
somehow with a strange and powerful feeling of the passage of
time; with a vague feeling of the mystery and elusiveness of
human life. The leaves whispered it overhead, the birds sang it in
chorus with the insects, and far above, in the measureless spaces of