The vision of his mother ... he raced home against the thunder he could see above them. Great drops of rain were already on the pavement; the day was night. He burst into the kitchen where his mother worked. “My! it is going to storm.” He saw that somehow it was still light in the kitchen. It was different from outdoors. There about his mother was a bright calm spot of day in the body of storm. She said: “Well, David, you got home in time. What are you worrying for?” David looked at his companion. Tom Rennard was clad in strangeness. David looked at Tom Rennard and the room where his mother worked receded: he could burst in on it no more, hear her say: “Well, David, you got home in time. What are you worrying for?” It was all moving away and his arms were helpless. There was Tom looking at his watch. Tom looked at him, who somehow was breathless beside him. “Well, we got here in time. Fifteen minutes ahead. What are you worrying for?” A shudder through David. The world was magic--black magic. He went beyond the station to a little hedge where a tree stood alone. He sat there alone. His heart made a beating music through his head. He held his head in his hands, there were tears in his mouth. “Mother, mother,” he murmured. “I miss you, mother.” The train crashed into the station: he had to return. II The pulse of moving left them numb. The pensiveness of rapid flight through the world came near them, could not transfix their numbness. Men and women in a railroad car--serried, determined; pointed the train, flung it against the city. David sat next the window. He saw the world fly past as if afraid and offended. The green comfort of meadows was too sweet for the sharp earnestness of the travelers. They had no will for the shadow of trees and the cool ambiance of little rivers. Their mood was a straight hard hot track of steel along which they flung: their mood cut through smile of fields, slumber of towns. Their minds hurled the train.... Tom and David sat together swathed in the pensiveness of travel. David was restrained and somehow broken. Tom made efforts to read. Mostly he held the book in his lap and looked before him. He spoke to David but David was impossible to speak to. Tom understood. His own coming to New York, eight years before, was there. It was an ecstasy, an angry birth. Manhattan girdled in flame, Manhattan a woman, terrible, virgin, and he aware of his own love and of his impotence before her. Moving in the train with Tom, this time beside the mystery of David, as that first time beside the mystery of his fate, was the seed of Tom’s fate--his past. Moving in Tom along the iron rails.... The train and the rails and that world were gone: were become a cloud of sense lifting him elsewhere. He dreamed of New York, of Ohio ... locust grove, slender, reticent, athrill with the restraint of some secret ... he dreamed of them as if they were not, he only was ... he a dream.