Here he stood sick with despair and doubt of all the world. He
turned away from the desolate homestead and walked on.

"But I'll see her-just once more. And then-" And again the mighty
significance, responsibility of life fell upon him. He felt as young
people seldom do the irrevocableness of living, the determinate,
unalterable character of living. He determined to begin to live in
some new way-just how he could not say.

IV

OLD man Kinney and his wife were getting their Sunday school
lessons with much bickering, when Will drove up the next day to
the dilapidated gate and hitched his team to a leaning post under
the oaks. Will saw the old man's head at the open window, but no
one else, though he
looked eagerly for Agnes as he walked up the familiar path. There
stood the great oak under whose shade he had grown to be a man.
How close the great tree seemed to stand to his heart, some way!
As the wind stirred in the leaves, it was like a rustle of greeting.

In that low old house they had all lived, and his mother had toiled
for thirty years. A sort of prison after all. There they were all born,
and there his father and his little sister had died. And then it had
passed into old Kinney's hands.

Walking along up the path he felt a serious weakness in his limbs,
and he made a pretense of stopping to look at a flowerbed
containing nothing but weeds. After seven years of separation he
was about to face once more the woman whose life came so near