What was that she had said about the money? He needn’t worry about it. A sort of bone to toss to the lone dog after he was kicked out. Ah, well! It was paid. He was glad of that. He was even grimly glad for his own destitution. It gave a kind of sense of satisfaction to have gone hungry and homeless to pay it all in one grand lump, and to have paid it at once, and through his lawyer, without any word to her or her father either. They should not be even distant witnesses of his humiliation. He would never cross their path again if he had his way. They should be as completely wiped out of his existence and he out of theirs as if the same universe did not hold them. He passed down the broad, pleasant street in the crisp air, and every home on either hand gave him a thrust of memory that stabbed him to the heart. It was such a home as one of these that he had hoped to have some day, although it would have been in the city, perhaps, for she always liked the city. He had hoped in the depths of his heart to persuade her to the country, though. Now he saw as in a revelation how futile such hopes had been. She would never have come to love sweet, quiet ways such as he loved. She couldn’t ever have really loved him, or she would have waited, would not have changed. Over and over again he turned the bitter story, trying to get it settled in his heart so that the sharp edges would not hurt so, trying to accustom himself to the thought that she whom he had cherished through the blackness of the years that were past was not what he had thought her. He stopped in the road beside a tall hedge that hid the Hazard house from view, and snatched out her picture that he had carried in his breast pocket till now; snatched it out, gazed upon it with a look that was not good to see on a young face, and tore it across! He took a step forward, and every step he tore a tiny fragment from the picture and flung it into the road bit by bit till the lovely face was mutilated in the dust where the feet of passers-by would grind upon it and where those great blue eyes that had gazed back at him from the picture so long would be destroyed forever. It was the last thread that bound him to her, that picture; and, when the last scrap of picture had fluttered away from him, he put his head down and strode forward like one who has cast away from him his last hope. The voice of Miss Marilla roused him like a homely, pleasant sound about the house of a morning when one has had an unhappy dream; and he lifted his head, and, soldier-like, dropped into the old habit of hiding his emotions.