Gant and Eliza came to his graduation. He found them lodgings in the town: it was early June -- hot, green, fiercely and voluptuously Southern. The campus was a green oven; the old grads went about in greasy pairs; the cool pretty girls, who never sweated, came in to see their young men graduate, and to dance; the mamas and papas were shown about dumbly and shyly.

On this rich stage, Gant, who had left his charnel-house of death for three days, saw his son Eugene. He came, gathered to life again, out of his grave. He saw his son enthroned in all the florid sentiment of commencement, and the whole of his heart was lifted out of the dust. Upon the lordly sward, shaded by great trees, and ringed by his solemn classmen and their families, Eugene read the Class Poem ("O Mother Of Our Myriad Hopes"). Then Vergil Weldon spoke, high-husky, deep, and solemn-sad; and Living Truth welled in their hearts. It was a Great Utterance. Be true! Be clean! Be good! Be men! Absorb the Negation! The world has need of. Life was never so worth. Never in history had there been. No other class had shown so great a promise as. Among other achievements, the editor of the paper had lifted the moral and intellectual level of the State two inches. The university spirit! Character! Service! Leadership!

The college was charming, half-deserted. Most of the students, except the graduating class, had departed. The air was charged with the fresh sensual heat, the deep green shimmer of heavy leafage, a thousand spermy earth and flower-scents. The young men were touched with sadness, with groping excitement, with glory.

Eugene's face grew dark with pride and joy there in the lovely wilderness. He could not speak. There was a glory in the world: life was panting for his embrace.

"Hm!" Eliza began, with a tremulous bantering smile, "your head will get turned by all the things they're saying about you." She took his hand in her rough warm grasp. Her eyes grew suddenly wet.

"Well, son," said Gant, "the rest is up to you now. I believe you're going to make a name for yourself." He laid a great dry hand clumsily upon his son's shoulder, and for a moment Eugene saw in the dead eyes the old dark of umber and unfound desire.

Eliza and Gant listened attentively to all the songs and speeches. Their son was a great man on the campus. They saw and heard him before his class, on the campus, and at graduation, when his prizes and honors were announced. And his teachers and companions spoke to them about him, and said he would have "a brilliant career." And Eliza and Gant were touched a little by the false golden glow of youth. They believed for a moment that all things were possible.

"Well, son," she said gravely. "I want you to go ahead now and try to be Somebody. None of the others ever had your opportunity, and I hope you do something with it. Your papa and I have done the best we could. The rest is up to you."

He took her hand in a moment of wild devotion and kissed it.

It was over. Gant, who under the stimulus of his son's graduation had almost regained the vitality of his middle years, relapsed now into whining dotage. The terrible heat came down and smote him. He faced with terror and weariness the long hot trip into the hills again.

"I'll do something," he said. "I will."

They looked shyly at his strange dark face, with all its passionate and naïve ardor, and they felt tenderness and love for his youth and all that was unknown to it. And a great love and pity welled up in him because of their strange and awkward loneliness, and because he felt, through some terrible intuition, that he was already indifferent to the titles and honors they desired for him, and because those which he had come to desire for himself were already beyond the scale of their value. And, before the vision of pity and loss and loneliness, he turned away, clutching his lean hand into his throat.

"Merciful God!" he whined. "Why did I ever come! O Jesus, how will I ever face that trip again! I can't bear it. I'll die before I get there! It's fearful, it's awful, it's cruel." And he wept weak snuffling sobs.

"Well, son," said Eliza, in the quiet moment before departure. "Have you thought yet of what you're going to do?"

"I'll talk to you in a few days when I see you at home," said Eugene. "I'll tell you about it then."

"Yes," said Gant, wetting his thumb, "for you've got to shift for yourself from now on. You've had the best education money can buy. The rest is up to you."

Eugene took them to Exeter and got them comfortably disposed in a Pullman. He was remaining for a few days to gather his belongings -- the clutter of four years, letters, books, old manuscript, worthless rubbish of every description, for he seemed to inherit Eliza's mania for blind accumulation. Extravagant with money, and unable to husband it, he saved everything else even when his spirit grew sick at the stale and dusty weariness of the past.

Mercifully the train began to move: he kissed them quickly and ran down the aisle.

Without asking sharply why, they felt the absurdity of clothing this bounding figure, with the wild dark face, in a frock-coat and string tie: he did not exist in business, trade, or law. More vaguely, they classified him as bookish and a dreamer -- Eliza referred to him as "a good scholar," which, in fact, he had never been. He had simply performed brilliantly in all things that touched his hunger, and dully, carelessly, and indifferently in all things that did not. No one saw very clearly what he was going to do -- he, surely, least of all -- but his family, following the tack of his comrades, spoke vaguely and glibly of "a career in journalism." This meant newspaper work. And, however unsatisfactory this may have been, their inevitable question was drugged for the moment by the glitter of success that had surrounded his life at the university.

He had nothing to tell them. He was nineteen; he had completed his college course; but he did not know what he was going to do. His father's plan that he should study law and "enter politics" had been forgotten since his sophomore year, when it became apparent that the impulse of his life was not toward law. His family felt obscurely that he was an eccentric --"queer," they called it -- and of an impractical or "literary" turn.

He went back to Pulpit Hill for two or three days of delightful loneliness in the deserted college. He prowled through the empty campus at midnight under the great moons of the late rich Spring; he breathed the thousand rich odors of tree and grass and flower, of the opulent and seductive South; and he felt a delicious sadness when he thought of his departure, and saw there in the moon the thousand phantom shapes of the boys he had known who would come no more.

But Eugene was untroubled by thought of a goal. He was mad with such ecstasy as he had never known. He was a centaur, moon-eyed and wild of mane, torn apart with hunger for the golden world. He became at times almost incapable of coherent speech. While talking with people, he would whinny suddenly into their startled faces, and leap away, his face contorted with an idiot joy. He would hurl himself squealing through the streets and along the paths, touched with the ecstasy of a thousand unspoken desires. The world lay before him for his picking -- full of opulent cities, golden vintages, glorious triumphs, lovely women, full of a thousand unmet and magnificent possibilities. Nothing was dull or tarnished. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and he could never die.

And he talked enchantingly about the good free life of the mind, cloistered study, the rich culture of the city, and about the food. "They give you food there that a man can eat, Mr. Gant," he said. "Your mind can do its work on it." Then he spoke of his own student days there, and of the great names of Royce and Everett, and William James.

And in the day he went to talk with Vergil Weldon. The old man was charming, confidential, full of wise intimacy, gentle humor. They sat beneath the great trees of his yard and drank iced tea. Eugene was thinking of California, Peru, Asia, Alaska, Europe, Africa, China. But he mentioned Harvard. For him, it was not the name of a university -- it was rich magic, wealth, elegance, joy, proud loneliness, rich books and golden browsing; it was an enchanted name like Cairo and Damascus. And he felt somehow that it gave a reason, a goal of profit, to his wild ecstasy.

"Yes," said Vergil Weldon approvingly. "It's the place for you, Mr. Gant. It doesn't matter about the others. They're ready now. But a mind like yours must not be pulled green. You must give it a chance to ripen. There you will find yourself."

Oh, my old Sophist, he thought. What were all the old philosophies that you borrowed and pranked up to your fancy, to you, who were greater than all? What was the Science of Thinking, to you, who were Thought? What if all your ancient game of metaphysics never touched the dark jungle of my soul? Do you think you have replaced my childhood's God with your Absolute? No, you have only replaced his beard with a mustache, and a glint of demon hawk-eyes. To me, you were above good, above truth, above righteousness. To me, you were the sufficient negation to all your teachings. Whatever you did was, by its doing, right. And now I leave you throned in memory. You will see my dark face burning on your bench no more; the memory of me will grow mixed and broken; new boys will come to win your favor and your praise. But you? Forever fixed, unfading, bright, my lord.

Eugene looked with passionate devotion at the grand old head, calm, wise and comforting. In a moment of vision, he saw that, for him, here was the last of the heroes, the last of those giants to whom we give the faith of our youth, believing like children that the riddle of our lives may be solved by their quiet judgment. He believed, and no experience, he knew, would ever make him disbelieve, that one of the great lives of his time had unfolded itself quietly in the little college town.

Then, while the old man talked, Eugene leaped suddenly to his feet, and grasped the lean hand tightly in his own.

Then, turning, he plunged off blindly down the path. He still loitered, although his baggage had been packed for days. With a desperate pain, he faced departure from that Arcadian wilderness where he had known so much joy. At night he roamed the deserted campus, talking quietly until morning with a handful of students who lingered strangely, as he did, among the ghostly buildings, among the phantoms of lost boys. He could not face a final departure. He said he would return early in autumn for a few days, and at least once a year thereafter.

"Mr. Weldon!" he said. "Mr. Weldon! You are a great man! I shall never forget you!"

Then one hot morning, on sudden impulse, he left. As the car that was taking him to Exeter roared down the winding street, under the hot green leafiness of June, he heard, as from the sea-depth of a dream, far-faint, the mellow booming of the campus bell. And suddenly it seemed to him that all the beaten walks were thudding with the footfalls of lost boys, himself among them, running for their class. Then, as he listened, the far bell died away, and the phantom runners thudded into oblivion. Soon the car roared up by Vergil Weldon's house, and as he passed, he saw the old man sitting below his tree.

"Good-bye," he cried. "Good-bye."

Eugene stood up in the car and waved his long arm in a gesture of farewell.

He saw the vast rich body of the hills, lush with billowing greenery, ripe-bosomed, dappled by far-floating cloud-shadows. But it was, he knew, the end.

Then, even while Eugene stood looking back upon the street, the car roared up across the lip of the hill, and drove steeply down into the hot parched countryside below. But as the lost world faded from his sight, Eugene gave a great cry of pain and sadness, for he knew that the elfin door had closed behind him, and that he would never come back again.

The old man stood up with a quiet salute of parting, slow, calm, eloquently tender.

It was the end, the end. It was the beginning of the voyage, the quest of new lands.

Far-forested, the horn-note wound. He was wild with the hunger for release: the vast champaign of earth stretched out for him its limitless seduction.

Gant was dead. Gant was living, death-inlife. In his big back room at Eliza's he waited death, lost and broken in a semi-life of petulant memory. He hung to life by a decayed filament, a corpse lit by infrequent flares of consciousness. The sudden death whose menace they had faced so long that it had lost its meaning, had never come to him. It had come where they had least expected it -- to Ben. And the conviction which Eugene had had at Ben's death, more than a year and a half before, was now a materialized certainty. The great wild pattern of the family had been broken forever. The partial discipline that had held them together had been destroyed by the death of their brother: the nightmare of waste and loss had destroyed their hope. With an insane fatalism they had surrendered to the savage chaos of life.

Except for Eliza. She was sixty, sound of body and mind, triumphantly healthy. She still ran Dixieland, but she had given up the boarders for roomers, and most of the duties of management she intrusted to an old maid who lived in the house. Eliza devoted most of her time to real estate.

She had, during the past year, got final control of Gant's property. She had begun to sell it immediately and ruthlessly, over his indifferent mutter of protest. She had sold the old house on Woodson Street for $7,000 -- a good enough price, she had said, considering the neighborhood. But, stark, bare, and raw, stripped of its girdling vines, annex now to a quack's sanitarium for "nervous diseases," the rich labor of their life was gone. In this, more than in anything else, Eugene saw the final disintegration of his family.

Eliza had also sold a wild tract of mountain farmland for $6,000, fifty acres on the Reynoldsville road for $15,000, and several smaller pieces. Finally she had sold Gant's shop upon the Square for $25,000 to a syndicate of real estate people who were going to erect on the site the town's first "skyscraper." With this money as capital, she began to "trade," buying, selling, laying down options, in an intricate and bewildering web.

She was obsessed. She talked real estate unendingly. She spent half her time talking to real estate men; they hovered about the house like flesh-flies. She drove off with them several times a day to look at property. As her land investments grew in amount and number, she became insanely niggardly in personal expenditure. She would fret loudly if a light was kept burning in the house, saying that ruin and poverty faced her. She seldom ate unless the food was given to her; she went about the house holding a cup of weak coffee and a crust of bread. A stingy careless breakfast was the only meal to which Luke and Eugene could look forward with any certainty: with angry guffaw and chortle, they ate, wedged in the little pantry -- the dining-room had been turned over to the roomers.

"Dixieland" itself had become enormously valuable. The street which she had foreseen years before had been cut through behind her boundaries: she lacked thirty feet of meeting the golden highway, but she had bought the intervening strip, paying without complaint a stiff price. Since then she had refused, with a puckered smile, an offer of $100,000 for her property.

Gant was fed and cared for by Helen. She moved back and forth in ceaseless fret between Eliza's house and Hugh Barton's, in constant rhythms of wild energy and depletion, anger, hysteria, weariness and indifference. She had had no children and, it seemed, would have none. For this reason, she had long periods of brooding morbidity, during which she drugged herself with nibbling potations of patent tonics, medicines with a high alcoholic content, home-made wines, and corn whiskey. Her large eyes grew lustreless and dull, her big mouth had a strain of hysteria about it, she would pluck at her long chin and burst suddenly into tears. She talked restlessly, fretfully, incessantly, wasting and losing herself in a net of snarled nerves, in endless gossip, incoherent garrulity about the townsfolk, the neighbors, disease, doctors, hospitals, death.

The deliberate calm of Hugh Barton sometimes goaded her to a frenzy. He would sit at night, oblivious of her tirade, gravely chewing his long cigar, absorbed in his charts, or in a late issue of System or of The American Magazine. This power of losing himself in solitary absorption would madden her. She did not know what she wanted, but his silence before her exasperated indictment of life drove her to frenzy. She would rush at him with a sob of rage, knock the magazine from his hands, and seize his thinning hair in the grip of her long fingers.

"You answer when I speak!" she cried, panting with hysteria. "I'm not going to sit here, night after night, while you sit buried in a story. The idea! The idea!" She burst into tears. "I might as well have married a dummy."

"Well, I'm willing to talk to you," he protested sourly, "but nothing I say to you seems to suit you. What do you want me to say?"

"Leave me! Go away! Get out! I hate you!"

Sometimes at night she would weep hysterically upon her pillow, and turn fiercely upon her mate.

It seemed, indeed, when she was in this temper, that she could not be pleased. She was annoyed and irritable if people agreed carefully with all her utterances; she was annoyed equally by their disagreement and by their silence. A remark about the weather, the most studiously uncontroversial opinion, aroused her annoyance.

He would rise obediently and go downstairs, but before he reached the living-room she would call fearfully after him, asking him to return.

She lavished kisses and abuse on him by turns: the mothering tenderness, in which she was drowning for want of a child, she poured out on a dirty little mongrel dog which had trotted in from the streets one night, half-dead from starvation. He was a snarling little brute with a rough black-and-white pelt, and an ugly lift of teeth for every one but his master and mistress, but he had grown waddling-fat upon choice meats and livers; he slept warmly on a velvet cushion and rode out with them, snarling at passers-by. She smothered the little cur with slaps and kisses, devoured him with baby-talk, and hated any one who disliked his mongrel viciousness. But most of her time, her love, her blazing energy, she gave to the care of her father. Her feeling toward Eliza was more bitter than ever: it was one of constant chaffering irritability, mounting at times to hatred. She would rail against her mother for hours:

And Eliza, confused and disturbed, would answer: "Why, child! What on earth do you mean? I took him in a big bowl of vegetable soup myself, for his lunch: he ate it all up without stopping. 'Why, pshaw! Mr. Gant,' I said (just to cheer him up), 'I don't believe there can be much wrong with any one with an appetite like that. Why, say,' I said…"

And she would burst out on Eliza, thus: "Mama, in God's name! Are you going to let that poor old man in there die for lack of proper care? Can't you ever get it into your head that papa's a sick man? He's got to have good food and decent treatment."

"I believe she's gone crazy. Don't you think so? Sometimes I think we ought to get guardians appointed and keep her under custody. Do you know that I buy almost every bite of food that goes into that house? Do you? If it weren't for me, she'd let him die right under her eyes. Don't you know she would? She's got so stingy she won't even buy food for herself. Why, good heavens!" she burst out in strong exasperation. "It's not my place to do those things. He's her husband, not mine! Do you think it's right? Do you?" And she would almost weep with rage.

Gant was a spectre in waxen yellow. His disease, which had thrust out its branches to all parts of his body, gave him an appearance of almost transparent delicacy. His mind was sunken out of life in a dim shadowland: he listened wearily and indifferently to all the brawling clamor around him, crying out and weeping when he felt pain, cold, or hunger, smiling when he was comfortable and at ease. He was taken back to Baltimore two or three times a year now for radium treatments: he had a brief flare of vitality and ease after each visit, but every one knew his relief would be only temporary. His body was a rotten fabric which had thus far miraculously held together.

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" cried Helen furiously. "Papa's a sick man. Aren't you ever going to understand that? Surely Ben's death should have taught us something," her voice ended in a scream of exasperation.

Meanwhile, Eliza talked incessantly about real estate, bought, sold and traded. About her own ventures she was insanely secretive; she would smile craftily when questioned about them, wink in a knowing fashion, and make a bantering noise in her throat.

"I'm not telling all I know," she said.

Her distrust and fear had been so great that, much to Eliza's annoyance, she had persuaded Gant, a year or two before, to make a will: he had left $5,000 to each of his five children, and the remainder of his property and money to his wife. And, as the summer advanced, she again persuaded him to appoint as executors the two people in whose honesty she had the greatest trust: Hugh Barton and Luke Gant.

This goaded her daughter's bitter curiosity almost past endurance, for, despite her angry mockery, the mania for property had bitten into her and Hugh Barton as well: secretly they respected Eliza's shrewdness and got her advice on property into which he was putting all his surplus earnings. But when Eliza refused to reveal her own investments, the girl would cry out in a baffled hysteria:

"She has no right to do that! Don't you know she hasn't? It's papa's property just as much as hers, you know. If she should die now, that estate would be in a terrible mess. No one knows what she's done: how much she's bought and sold. I don't think she knows herself. She keeps her notes and papers hidden away in little drawers and boxes."

"We're the ones who've always had the interests of the family at heart, and we've had nothing for it. We've been the generous ones, but Eugene and Steve will get it all in the end. 'Gene's had everything: we've had nothing. Now he's talking of going to Harvard. Had you heard about that?"

To Luke, who, since his discharge from the navy, had been salesman, in the mountain district, for electrical farm-lighting plants, she said:

"His m-m-m-majesty!" said Luke ironically. "Who's going to p-p-p-pay the bills?"

"I've never had your chance. Every one was down on Stevie. If he'd had the chance some folks have, he'd be right up there with the Big Boys now. And at that, he's got more brains than a lot of people I know who've been to college. You get that, don't you?"

Thus, as the summer waned, over the slow horror of Gant's death was waged this ugly warfare of greed and hatred. Steve came in from Indiana; within four days he was insane from whiskey and veronal. He began to follow Eugene around the house, backing him ominously into corners, seizing him belligerently by the arm, as he breathed upon him his foul yellow stench, and spoke to him with maudlin challenge.

He thrust his pustulate face, foul and snarling, close to Eugene's.

Then, as Steve sprawled dazed and witless on the floor, Luke sprang upon him with stammering curse, and, past reason, began to drag him up and down. And Eugene sprang upon Luke to stop him, and all three stammered and cursed and begged and accused, while the roomers huddled at the door, and Eliza wept, calling for help, and Daisy, who was up from the South with her children, wrung her plump hands, moaning "Oh, they'll kill him! They'll kill him. Have mercy on me and my poor little children, I beg of you."

"Get away, Steve! Get away!" the boy muttered. He tried to move, but his brother blocked him. "I tell you to get away, you swine!" he screamed suddenly, and he struck the evil face away from him.

Then the shame, the disgust, the maudlin grievance, the weeping women, the excited men.

"You m-m-m-miserable degenerate!" cried Luke. "You c-c-came home because you thought p-p-p-papa would die and leave you a little money. You d-d-don't deserve a penny!"

He was weeping with genuine rage and fear, with the angry suspicion of a beaten child. Eugene looked at him with pity and nausea: he was so foul, whipped, and frightened. Then, with a sense of unreal horror and disbelief, he listened while they bawled out their accusations. This disease of money and greed tainted other people, the people in books, not one's own. They were snarling like curs over one bone -- their little shares in the money of an unburied dead man who lay, with low moanings of disease, not thirty feet away.

"I know what you're trying to do," Steve screamed in an agony of suspicion. "You're all against me! You've framed up on me and you're trying to beat me out of my share."

The family drew off in two camps of hostile watchfulness: Helen and Luke on one side and Daisy and Steve, subdued but stubborn, on the other. Eugene, who had no talent for parties, cruised through sidereal space with momentary anchorings to earth. He loafed along the avenue, and lounged in Wood's; he gossiped with the pharmacy rakes; he courted the summer girls on boarding-house porches; he visited Roy Brock in a high mountain village, and lay with a handsome girl in the forest; he went to South Carolina; he was seduced by a dentist's wife at Dixieland. She was a prim ugly woman of forty-three, who wore glasses and had sparse hair. She was a Daughter of the Confederacy and wore the badge constantly on her starched waists.

He thought of her only as a very chill and respectable woman. He played Casino -- the only game he knew -- with her and the other boarders, and called her "ma'am." Then one night she took his hand, saying she would show him how to make love to a girl. She tickled the palm, put it around her waist, lifted it to her breast, and plumped over on his shoulder, breathing stertorously through her pinched nostrils and saying, "God, boy!" over and over. He plunged around the dark cool streets until three in the morning, wondering what he would do about it. Then he came back to the sleeping house, and crept on shoeless feet into her room. Fear and disgust were immediate. He climbed the hills to ease his tortured spirit and stayed away from the house for hours. But she would follow him down the halls or open her door suddenly on him, clad in a red kimono. She became very ugly and bitter, and accused him of betraying, dishonoring, and deserting her. She said that where she came from -- the good old State of South Carolina -- a man who treated a woman in such fashion would get a bullet in him. Eugene thought of new lands. He was in an agony of repentance and guilty abasement: he framed a long plea for pardon and included it in his prayers at night, for he still prayed, not from devout belief, but from the superstition of habit and number, muttering a set formula over sixteen times, while he held his breath. Since childhood he had believed in the magical efficacy of certain numbers -- on Sunday he would do only the second thing that came into his head and not the first -- and this intricate ritual of number and prayer he was a slave to, not to propitiate God, but to fulfil a mysterious harmonic relation with the universe, or to pay worship to the demonic force that brooded over him. He could not sleep of nights until he did this.

But in his heart he knew he was going to leave. And no one opposed him very much. Helen railed against him at times to Luke, but made only a few indifferent and unfriendly comments to himself about it. Gant moaned wearily, saying: "Let him do as he likes. I can't pay out any more money on his education. If he wants to go, his mother must send him." Eliza pursed her lips thoughtfully, made a bantering noise, and said:

Eliza finally grew suspicious of the woman, picked a quarrel with her, and ejected her.

No one said very much to him about going to Harvard. He himself had no very clear reason for going, and only in September, a few days before the beginning of the term, decided to go. He talked about it at intervals during the summer, but, like all his family, he needed the pressure of immediacy to force a decision. He was offered employment on several newspapers in the State, and on the teaching staff of the run-down military academy that topped a pleasant hill two miles from town.

"Hm! Harvard! That's mighty big talk, boy. Where are you going to get the money?"

"I don't want it when I'm rotten! I want it now! To hell with the real estate! I want none of your dirt! I hate it! Let me go!" he screamed; and in his fury he began to beat his head against the wall.

"I want to go!" he said. "I've got to have it now! Now!"

"Then," he said finally, "why can't I pay my way from my share in papa's estate?"

"I can get it," he said darkly. "People will lend it to me."

"No, son," she said with instant grave caution. "I don't want you to do anything like that. You mustn't start life by accumulating debts."

Eliza pursed her lips for a moment.

Eugene began to beat suddenly against his ribs.

"Why, child!" said Eliza angrily. "You talk as if we were millionaires. I don't even know that there's going to be any share for anybody. Your papa was persuaded into that against his better judgment," she added fretfully.

"Well," she said, at length. "I'll send you for a year. Then we'll see."

He was silent, trying to force the terrible sentence through his parched lips.

He was mad with a sense of frustration.

"What is it?" he asked, looking at it with sullen suspicion.

"Yes," said Eugene, "and you think me a fool for it. But I'd rather be done now than later. That's my release, not yours."

"Oh, just a little form Hugh wants you to sign, in case anything should happen. It's a release."

Then, as his mind picked its way slowly through the glib jargon of the law, he saw that the paper was an acknowledgment that he had already received the sum of five thousand dollars in consideration of college fees and expenses. He lifted his scowling face to his brother. Luke looked at him for a moment, then burst into a crazy whah-whah, digging him in the ribs. Eugene grinned sullenly, and said:

"A release from what?" said Eugene, staring at it.

But, two or three days before his departure, Luke, who was taking Gant to Baltimore the next day, thrust a sheet of typed paper into his hand.

He signed the paper and gave it back to his brother with a feeling of sad triumph.

"Whah-whah! Now you've done it!" said Luke, with witless guffaw.

"Give me your pen."

He thought of Hugh Barton's grave foxy face. There was no victory for him there and he knew it. After all, he thought, I have my ticket and the money for my escape in my pocket. Now, I am done with it cleanly. It's a good ending, after all.

When Eliza heard of this occurrence, she protested sharply:

Eliza stood upon the porch, her hands clasped loosely across her stomach. Eugene was leaving the house and going toward the town. It was the day before his departure; dusk was coming on, the hills were blooming in strange purple dusk. Eliza watched him go.

Then, after a thoughtful pause, she said doubtfully: "Well, we'll see, then. I've promised to send him for a year."

In the darkness by the house, Eugene clutched at his throat. He wept for all the lovely people who would not come again.

"Why here!" she said. "They've no right to do that. The child's still a minor. Your papa always said he intended to give him his education."

In the dark he knew that she was smiling tremulously at him, pursing her lips. She caught his low mutter of annoyance:

"Spruce up there, boy!" she called. "Spruce up! Throw your shoulders back!"

"Well, when you get way up there -- as the fellow says -- in Yankeedom, you want to look up your Uncle Emerson and all your Boston kin. Your Aunt Lucy took a great liking to you when they were down here -- they always said they'd be glad to see any of us if we ever came up -- when you're a stranger in a strange land it's mighty good sometimes to have some one you know. And say -- when you see your Uncle Emerson, you might just tell him not to be surprised to see me at any time now" (she nodded pertly at him)—"I reckon I can pick right up and light out the same as the next fellow when I get ready -- I may just pack up and come -- without saying a word to any one -- I'm not going to spend all my days slaving away in the kitchen -- it don't pay -- if I can turn a couple of trades here this Fall, I may start out to see the world like I always intended to -- I was talking to Cash Rankin about it the other day --'Why, Mrs. Gant,' he said, 'if I had your head I'd be a rich man in five years -- you're the best trader in this town,' he said. 'Don't you talk to me about any more trades,' I said --'when I get rid of what I've got now I'm going to get out of it, and not even listen to any one who says real-estate to me -- we can't take any of it with us, Cash,' I said --'there are no pockets in shrouds and we only need six feet of earth to bury us in the end -- so I'm going to pull out and begin to enjoy life -- or as the feller says -- before it's too late'—'Well, I don't know that I blame you, Mrs. Gant,' he said -- 'I reckon you're right -- we can't take any of it with us,' he said -- 'and besides, even if we could, what good would it do us where we're goin'?'-- Now here" (she addressed Eugene with sudden change, with the old looser masculine gesture of her hand)—"here's the thing I'm going to do -- you know that lot I told you I owned on Sunset Crescent --"

"Why, yes," she said, nodding briskly. "I'd show them! I'd act as if I thought I was Somebody. Son," she said more gravely, with a sudden change from her tremulous banter, "it worries me to see you walk like that. You'll get lung-trouble as sure as you're born if you go all humped over. That's one thing about your papa; he always carried himself as straight as a rod. Of course, he's not as straight now as he used to be-as the fellow says" (she smiled tremulously)—"I reckon we all have a tendency to shrink up a little as we get older. But in his young days there wasn't a straighter man in town."

And then the terrible silence came between them again. He had turned sullenly upon her while she talked. Indecisively she stopped, peered down at him with white pursed face, and in that silence, behind the trivial arras of her talk, he heard the bitter song of all her life.

The marvellous hills were blooming in the dusk. Eliza pursed her lips reflectively a moment, then continued:

The marvellous hills were blooming in the dusk. We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.

Without speech now they faced each other, without speech they knew each other. In a moment Eliza turned quickly from him and with the queer unsteady steps with which she had gone out from the room where Ben lay dying, she moved toward the door.

"Good-bye," he muttered harshly. "Good-bye! Good-bye, mama!" A wild strange cry, like that of a beast in pain, was torn from his throat. His eyes were blind with tears; he tried to speak, to get into a word, a phrase, all the pain, the beauty, and the wonder of their lives -- every step of that terrible voyage which his incredible memory and intuition took back to the dwelling of her womb. But no word came, no word could come; he kept crying hoarsely again and again, "Good-bye, good-bye."

And now the terrible silence came between them once again.

He rushed back across the walk and with a single bound took the steps that mounted to the porch. He caught the rough hands that she held clasped across her body, and drew them swiftly, fiercely, to his breast.

She understood, she knew all he felt and wanted to say, her small weak eyes were wet as his with tears, her face was twisted in the painful grimace of sorrow, and she kept saying:

"Poor child! Poor child! Poor child!" Then she whispered huskily, faintly: "We must try to love one another."

The terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, wearily. It stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket of our lives. No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining, no hating.

And now the voyage out. Where?

O mortal and perishing love, born with this flesh and dying with this brain, your memory will haunt the earth forever.