He had little actual packing to do--merely the collecting of a few masculine odds and ends, and then his artistic accompaniments. Nothing was of consequence but these; the rest were tossed together indifferently, but the picture was to be left until the last moment, that its paint might be dry beyond a doubt. Having completed his preparations he went out. He had the day before him, and scarcely knew what to do with it, but it must be killed in one way or another. He wandered up the mountain and at last lay down with his cigar among the laurels. He was full of a strange excitement which now thrilled, now annoyed him. He came back in the middle of the afternoon and laughed a rather half-hearted laugh at the excellent Mandy's comment upon his jaded appearance. “Ye look kinder tuckered out,” she said. “Ye'd oughtn't ter walked so fur when ye was a-gwine off to-night. Ye'd orter rested.” She stopped the churn-dasher and regarded him with a good-natured air of interest. “Hev ye seed Dusk to say good-by to her?” she added. “She's went over the mountain ter help Mirandy Stillins with her soap. She wont be back fur a day or two.” He went into his room and shut the door. A fierce repulsion sickened him. He had heretofore held himself with a certain degree of inward loftiness; he had so condemned the follies and sins of other men, and here he found himself involved in a low and common villainy, in the deceits which belonged to his crime, and which preyed upon simplicity and ignorant trust. He went and stood before his easel, hot with a blush of self-scorn. “Has it come to this?” he muttered through his clinched teeth--“to _this!_” He made an excited forward movement; his foot touched the supports of the easel, jarring it roughly; the picture fell upon the floor. “What?” he cried out. “Beck! You! Great God!” For before him, revealed by the picture's fall, the easel held one of the fairest memories he had of the woman he had proved himself too fickle and slight to value rightly. It was merely a sketch made rapidly one day soon after his arrival and never wholly completed, but it had been touched with fire and feeling, and the face looked out from the canvas with eyes whose soft happiness stung him to the quick with the memories they brought. He had meant to finish it, and had left it upon the easel that he might turn to it at any moment, and it had remained there, covered by a stronger rival--forgotten. He sat down in a chair and his brow fell upon his hands. He felt as if he had been clutched and dragged backward by a powerful arm. When at last he rose, he strode to the picture lying upon the floor, ground it under his heel, and spurned it from him with an imprecation. He was, at a certain hour, to reach a particular bend in the road some miles distant. He was to walk to this place and if he found no one there, to wait.