Allston blew out the big lamp on the table and sank down in a chair before the open fire. He was tired neither physically nor mentally. And yet in some ways he was glad to be alone. For the last few hours he had been under a nervous strain in Wilmer’s presence. He was like a man in a closed room with many doors trying to feel his way out through one opening and then another, discovering that some of the doors gave a little way and others not at all, in the end to be left exactly where he started. Further, to complicate matters, that thin voice in the dark outside still called to him. He heard it even now above the rustling and creaking and eerie moan of a rising wind beating against the house, presage of a storm. It was extraordinary to him that such a situation could have developed out of such innocuous material. The whole adventure had begun so lazily and drowsily! Half asleep at the wheel of his wheezy gray runabout he had been keeping to twenty miles an hour over a country road that seemed as though it might end at any time in primeval forest. It was just the setting he had sought for that complete relaxation which was to allow his mind, muddied by two years of war, to settle into the placid pool it always had been. So it had seemed about to do when Roxie Kester appeared in the road and forced his head-on collision with a chestnut-oak. But that seemed merely like a temporary interruption. The kindness of the Howes offered him just as good an opportunity to bask in the sun as did the open road. This was a golden land dripping with milk and honey where a man need not keep his eyes more than half open. It was a country of blue sky and birds and shocked wheat and flowers and people at their ease. It still was. If he could only get hold of that idea and keep it, he might find that the present crisis which appeared so acute was merely a morbid mental condition unwarranted by fact. He was only a guest in passing. He had distorted his values. This was only a bypath incident not to be taken too seriously. The main road of his life lay in another direction, though where only the Lord knew. Somehow it must be related to the past he had already lived, and must develope out of those surroundings with which he was already familiar. Yet it was not easy to think of any future which should eliminate this girl who had just left him. He had known women twenty years, neighbors at home, whom he could banish with less difficulty. He had seen them with his eyes alone. He had never made them part of his thoughts--of his deeper thoughts. And they had never made him question himself. Nor had they ever made him feel.