"I'll tell you what it means, then. It means that I divorce myself from everything of Now; that I unlive my past life; that I leave my companionship with dumb things--horses and cattle and birds--and I love them, for they are natural. This seems childish to you; but live with them for years, more than with human beings, and you will understand. "More than all else it means that I must become as a stranger to my family; and they depend upon me. My friends of now would not be my friends when I returned; they would be as I am to you now--a thing to be patronized." He hesitated, and then went recklessly on: "I've told you so much, I may as well tell you everything. On the next farm to ours there's a little, brown-eyed girl--Faith's her name--and--and--" His new-found flow of words failed, and he ended in unconscious apostrophe: "To think of growing out of her life, and strange to my father and mother--it's all so selfish, so hideously selfish!" "I think I understand," said the soft voice at his side. They drove on without a word, the frost-bound road ringing under the horses' feet, the stars above smiling sympathetic indulgence at this last repetition of the old, old tale of man. The gentle voice of the collegian broke the silence. "You say it would be selfish to leave. Is it not right, though, and of necessity, that we think first of self?" He paused, then boldly sounded the keynote of the universe. "Is not selfishness the first law of nature?" he asked. Landers opened his lips to answer, but closed them without a word. III Brown, magnetic Fall, with her overflow of animal activity, shaded gradually into the white of lethic Winter; then in slow dissolution relinquished supremacy to the tans and mottled greens of Springtime. Unsatisfied as man, the mighty cycle of the seasons' evolution moved on until the ripe yellow of harvest and of corn-field wrote "Autumn" on the broad page of the prairies. Of an evening in early September, Guy Landers turned out from the uncut grass of the farm-yard into the yellow, beaten dust of the country road. He walked slowly, for it was his last night on the farm, and it would be long ere he passed that way again. This was the road that led to the district school-house, and with him every inch had been familiar from childhood. As a boy he had run barefoot in its yellow dust, and paddled joyously in the soft mud of its summer showers. The rows of tall cottonwoods that bordered it on either side he had helped plant, watching them grow year by year, as he himself had grown, until now the whispering of prairie night winds in their loosely hung leaves spoke a language as familiar as his native tongue. He walked down the road for a half-mile, and turned in between still other tall cottonwoods at another weather-stained, square farm-house, scarcely distinguishable from his own. "'Evening, Mr. Baker." He nodded to the round-shouldered man who sat smoking on the doorstep.