Baxter's Hill! No sense of recognition or surprise arrested Philip when he found himself skirting the foot of the hill and, before long, running over the grassy path by the Mitchen River. Here he had found escape before to-night, here wall after wall that girdled the city of his slaveries had come crashing down! But as he left the bridge behind him and followed two or three broad curves of the river, out toward the cleaner spaces of water, he was conscious only that his strength was almost spent and his feet were dragging. Suddenly he collapsed. His legs gave way at the knees and his forehead fell into thick grass. The strange elation which had impelled him into the night, in a single moment deserted him. His body was racked with misery, his face twitched. With a last effort he turned his body round, stretched out his arms, and lay staring into passionless night. Stark misery held him clamped to the ground. Vain and vain, he felt, his life had been, his life consummated now by this last treachery! Each of his little philosophies had but pandered to his conceit, to his sentimental stupidities, immured him the more closely in the stinking castle of Self. Sex had led him away and he had wallowed in its sty--he who had been granted, by his living mother and his dead, the surest path into open spaces and a wind from the sea.... So for some time in this black despair he reproached himself with having at no time accepted the clean way; as having been always odious, an insect in rotten wood. The mood passed. Another came, not armed with talons, but cold, profound, like a fog. How long this mood lasted there can be no telling. Yet it was at the very heart of this desolation that he became aware of a warmth and a benediction which had descended upon him. His face was being soothed with the contact of kindly flesh! He heard the breathing of an animal. At last he knew that a horse was moving its soft mouth up and down his face, assuring him that now he might throw aside his sorrow, enter once more into the company of innocent things. A few yards away he perceived another horse grazing, a misty sweetness against the background of night. The beauty of the arched line of its neck seemed almost to arrest his heart. The horse over him, as having achieved its intent, brought its head away. He could hear the champing of its jaws, the tearing of grass. The lad looked steadily towards the waned stars and the clear moon. Much lay behind him, he knew. More lay in front of him. Beyond the bridge along the road, deep in his city, lay a little thing and a great, the first republic, School, whose citizenship he must yet earn. He had moved there hitherto with averted eyes, a stranger. Thence great affairs and greater expanded circle-wise, beyond race, beyond country, beyond even the gigantic world, out beyond the moon, the sun; even--he laughed aloud--even into the hazard of the very stars.