in lines of fire, and looked himself as it were in the face, feeling that this at last was the truth which had burst upon him, scattering to the wind all his dreams. He turned without a word, and walked back to Camelford. There seemed no more doubt or power of question in his mind. He did not even feel as if any painful accident had happened to him; only that it was all over--finished and past, and the seal put to the grave of his dreams. He even walked back with more assured steps, with less sense of a burden on his shoulders and a yoke about his neck. It had been very sweet and very bitter, delightsome and miserable, while it lasted; but now it was over. And it never occurred to him that the conclusion which he thus accepted so summarily was as unreasonable as the beginning. No; the time of dreaming was over, he thought, and now at last there stood revealed to him the real and the true. CHAPTER XXVII. It was late in the afternoon when John reached Camelford. He had stopped to rest at a roadside public-house, where he ate and drank, as a man might do in the exhaustion of grief coming home from a funeral. He had sat before the rustic door, and watched the carts that went slowly past with heavy wheels, and the unfrequent passengers; and he had felt very much as if he had been at a funeral. It was a long walk, and he was very footsore and weary when he reached his lodgings. He was out of training, and the fire and his accident had impaired his strength, and his heart was not light enough to give him any assistance. When he shut himself once more into his little parlour, he was so much worn out that he had no strength to do anything. He had meant to return only for the sake of the portmanteau, which imagination represented to him lying open on the floor of his bedroom, all packed, which it was a comfort to think of; but after his twenty-miles walk he had no longer the energy to gather his little possessions together. He laid his aching limbs on the sofa and tried to rest. But it was very hard to rest; he wanted to be in motion all the time; he did not feel able to confront the idea of spending all the gloomy evening alone in that dreary little room. Home, home, his mind kept saying. It would not be cheerful at home. He did not know how he was to bear the stillness, and his mother’s cry of wonder, and his father’s questionings. But yet a necessity was upon him to go on and make an end of the whole matter. After his first pause of weariness, he sprang up and rang his bell, and told his landlady he was going away. “Get my bill ready, please,” he said; “and if you will put my things together for me, and send for a cab for the eight o’clock train----” “Lord, sir, I hope it aint nothing in the rooms! they’re nice rooms as ever could be, and as comfortable as I could make them, or any woman,” she said. John comforted her _amour propre_ as well as he could, with a tale of circumstances that compelled his departure, and felt as