"Hold a moment," called Reynolds, taking a pencil and a small memorandum-book from his pocket, "wait till I write a few words." He began rapidly writing, then stopped and tore up the leaf, looked aimlessly about for a time and turned abruptly off, saying in a strangely dry voice: "Never mind: good-by, Dan." The carriage rolled away, the sound of its wheels on the street coming back to his ears in gradually diminishing clacks, reminding him that the last fragile link that had connected him with the old plantation was broken. He walked across the railroad tracks and sat down on a breezy point of the bluff overhanging the river. There was something in the river, there was something in the wind, the water, the sky and the wide horizon that cooled the fever in his blood for the time and set his brain to work with less confusion. His long years of hermit life had developed in him the habit of self-communion to such an extent that it required solitude to reduce his distracted faculties to something near their normal relations. We who view from the mere artist's standpoint the operations of those influences that control the destinies of men, sometimes see a hideous stroke of humor in the doings of fate. Tragedy and comedy lie so close to each other, that a mere change of intonation in the reading of a line may determine the difference between them. So, in reality, what under one light is incomparably tragic may, under another, appear trivial and almost comic. Beresford's failure with Agnes Ransom, though just as final and conclusive, seems a small thing beside the overwhelming disaster that fell upon Reynolds in the same field, and yet one might say: failure can go no further than failure: Beresford lost all,--how could Reynolds lose more? Is it really a more hopeless and tragic thing to love and be loved and lose than to love and not be loved and lose? Was it the difference between the men, or the circumstances, that enabled Beresford to take pleasure in a friend, his dogs and his gun, whilst Reynolds sat dreary-hearted, wretched, unconsolable, with folded hands and bowed head, alone by the river? This set of questions may not be solved by any artistic analysis. The solution is in the bold impression of the facts caught at a glance by every one who has any considerable reach of human sympathy.