March Gilchrist’s New York friend was a bachelor cousin, who was always delighted to have “a good fellow” drop in upon him on Sunday evening. March, in the uneasy wretchedness that beset him, honestly intended to visit him when he took the five o’clock train. He wanted to get away from the place for a few hours, he said; away from tormenting associations and possible catechists, and think calmly of the next step to be taken. By the time he reached Jersey City he had discovered that he was trying to get away from himself and not from his home; moreover, that he wanted neither dinner nor the society of the genial celibate. He stepped from the train, turned into the station restaurant, sat down at the table he had occupied on the day he landed from the _City of Rome_ and missed the noon train, and ordered at random something to eat. The long table built in the middle of the room was surrounded by a party of men and women. The men wore full black beards and a great deal of waistcoat, crossed by gold ropes. The women had round, black eyes, high-bridged noses and pronounced complexions. March tried not to see them, and tried to eat what was set before him. It made him sick to observe that Hetty’s place was filled by an overblown young lady whose bang made a definite downward peak between her black brows, and who had ten rings on the left hand and five on the right. He caught the 6.30 train back to Fairhill. He had made up his sensible mind to talk over his family to a project marvelously well developed when one remembers that the inception was not an hour old when he swung himself off upon the platform of the Fairhill station. He would set out next week for the Adirondacks, set up a forest studio, and begin “serious work.” The phrase jumped with his mood. Nothing else would draw the inflammation out of the wound. He meant to bear up like a man under the blow he had received, to forget disappointment in labor for a worthy end; love, in ambition. He took the orchard in his walk home from the station. It was quite out of his way, and he was not guilty of the weakness of denying this. He went there deliberately and with purpose, vaulting the fence from the quiet street at the foot of the hill, as he had done on that memorable Sunday when the orchards were “all a-flutter with pink.” One more look at the nook under green apple-boughs would be a sad satisfaction, and the contrast between what he had hoped and what he knew to be rock-bottomed reality, would be a salutary tonic. One look he must have—a look that should be farewell to folly and regret. While still twenty yards away from the arbor he espied something that looked like a mass of white drapery lying upon the turf. He stood just without the drooping boughs fencing the sleeper about, his face framed in an opening of the foliage, as Hetty, aroused by Thor’s bound from her side, raised her eyelids and closed them again with a smile of dreamy delight upon eyes swimming in luminous tears.