He brought the poker down hard upon the cerebrum of the iron angel, who resented the insult by tumbling over on the funnel; thence, with a slam, to the floor. Fenton picked up the ornament with a red face, and restored it to its place. He felt, as a man sometimes does, more rebuked than irritated by the inanimate thing. “Good-by,” said Bayard gently. It was all he said. He still held out his hand. His classmate wrung it, and passed, with bowed head, from his presence. * * * * * The happy weather held over into the next day; and the harbor wore her celestial smile. The gentleness of summer clothed in the colors of spring rested upon the wooded coast beyond the long cliff-outline, upon the broken scallops of the beaches, and the moss-green piers of the docks, upon the waves swelling without foam, and the patched sails of the anchored fleet unfurled to dry. The water still held the blue and gray tints that betoken cold weather too recently past or too soon returning to be forgotten. But the wind was south; and the saxifrage was in bud upon the downs in the clefts of the broken rocks between the boulders. Bayard was a weak and weary man that day,--the events of the previous evening had told upon him more than he would have supposed possible,--and he gave himself a luxury. He put the world and the evil of it from his heart and brain, and went out on Windover Point, to sun himself, alone; crawling along, poor fellow, at a sad pace, stopping often to rest, and panting as he pushed on. He had been an athletic lad, a vigorous, hearty man; illness and its subtle train of physical and mental consequences spoke in the voices of strangers to him. “They will pass on,” he thought. Bayard was such a lovable, cordial, human man, that the isolation of his life in Windover had affected him more than it might have done a natural recluse. Solitude is the final test of character as well as of nature.