The going was quiet. Not much laughing. Howard stood at the door and said good-night to them all, his heart very tender. "Come and see us," they said. "I will," he replied cordially. "I'll try and get around to see everybody, and talk over old times, before I go back." After the wagons had driven out of the yard, Howard turned and put his arm about his mother's neck. "Tired?" "A little." "Well, now good night. I'm going for a little stroll." His brain was too active to sleep. He kissed his mother good-night, and went out into the road, his hat in his hand, the cool moist wind on his hair. It was very dark, the stars being partly hidden by a thin vapor. On each side the hills rose, every line familiar as the face of an old friend. A whippoorwill called occasionally from the hillside, and the spasmodic jangle of a bell now and then told of some cow's battle with the mosquitoes. As he walked, he pondered upon the tragedy he had rediscovered in these people's lives. Out here under the inexorable spaces of the sky, a deep distaste of his own life took possession of him. He felt like giving it all up. He thought of the infinite tragedy of these lives which the world loves to call peaceful and pastoral. His mind went out in the aim to help them. What could he do to make life better worth living? Nothing. They must live and die practically as he saw them to-night. And yet he knew this was a mood, and that in a few hours the love and the habit of life would come back upon him and upon them; that he would go back to the city in a few days; that these people would live on and make the best of it. "I'll make the best of it," he said at last, and his thought came back to his mother and Grant. IV The next day was a rainy day; not a shower, but a steady rain--an unusual thing in midsummer in the West. A cold, dismal day in the fireless, colorless farmhouses. It came to Howard in that peculiar reaction which surely comes during a visit of this character, when thought is a weariness, when the visitor longs for his own familiar walls and pictures and books, and longs to meet his friends, feeling at the same time the tragedy of life which makes friends nearer and more congenial than blood-relations. Howard ate his breakfast alone, save Baby and Laura its mother going about the room. Baby and mother alike insisted on feeding him to death. Already dyspeptic pangs were setting in. "Now ain't there something more I can--" "Good heavens! No!" he cried in dismay. "I'm likely to die of dyspepsia now. This honey and milk, and these delicious hot biscuits--" "I'm afraid it ain't much like the breakfasts you have in the city." "Well, no, it ain't," he confessed. "But this is the kind a man needs when he lives in the open air." She sat down opposite him, with her elbows on the table, her chin in her palm, her eyes full of shadows.