He left the house walking, carrying his bag up the hill into Eastlake: a train left for the city at eleven-fifty-eight. Lee turned, beyond his property, and saw the light burning in what had been his and Fanny's room; the rest of the house, except for the glimmer below, was dark. The winter night was encrusted with stars. A piercing regret seized him--that he was past the middle of forty and not in the early twenties. To be young and to know Savina! To be young and free. To be young ... the increasing rapidity with which he went forward had the aspect of an endeavor to waste no more precious time. V The brief level voice of Savina Grove arranging over the telephone an hour, very late in the afternoon, for him to call, gave Lee a comparatively long time in which to examine his feelings, particularly in connection with Savina. His state of mind, his intentions, he realized, should be clear for the moment when he saw her. In general they were; but the particulars, the details of any probable immediate action, evaded him. He should have to consult her about them. What he most firmly grasped of all was that he couldn't--what, in reality, he breathed to himself was they--remain in New York. The comparatively orderly and delayed legal arrangement projected by the Morrises and Mina Raff seemed to have no application to the impetuosity of the situation before him. However, he was advancing at a speed, to a position, for which there was no warrant. None at all. Perhaps Savina, satisfied by the one occasion which--he had been so careful to insist--must be the last, would regard him as merely importunate. Strictly held to discretion by the fact of Fanny, Savina might have found him then--more available than when free--only the acceptable model of an indiscreet man. Yet, he reminded himself, he hadn't left Eastlake, broken wide open his home, on account of Savina. This, he again insisted, would have happened independently of her; his life in Eastlake had broken up of its own accord; its elements had been too tenuous for the withstanding any longer of the stress of existence. But, he was forced to add, the collapse had been hastened by his knowledge of Savina. And this brought him to the examination of what, at bottom, she meant to him. What was her significance, her bulk, in his life?