He lifted his head with a most mundane pride and called aloud to his cattle, his robust, mellow voice echoing along the savage steeps. Then, with the whole pastoral train once more in motion, he rode on down the rugged mountain ways, sitting with a proud erectness,—the lingering influence of his arrogations in the conversation,—his broad hat pushed back from his brow, his spirited face full of resolution and confidence again, and with that imaginative, meditative look once more in his eyes; for, urged by his contempt for the man from whom he had just parted, it cost him no effort to discharge his flexible mind, almost his very memory, of the conversation and of the existence of his late companion. But he could not keep his thoughts upon congenial themes. Over and again, to be sure, he reverted to the trend of his habitual meditations. It was thus, he reflected, that they of old had journeyed with their flocks under the open sky. He saw Jacob’s cattle instead of his own slowly tending down the defiles; now and again he passed a bubbling spring, full of tinkling tremors of sound stealing out into the silence of this richly luxuriant land, and to him it was a “well of springing water in a desert place;” sheep they had of old, and kine, and horses, and he marveled much what a camel might be. Then suddenly, with a deep sigh, he was again striving with the pursuing pack of remorseful, sharp-fanged regrets, falling upon him anew, with a freshened capacity to tear and mangle, recruited in that short respite. With the veiled future before, that no prescient eye might even vaguely discern; with an urgent sense of justification, that nevertheless could not justify his deed to himself; with a self-effacing desire to atone for what he felt was no fault of his, as if the sacrifice could restore all as it was at this hour of yesterday, he reviewed the scene, burnt as it was into his brain, and shrank once more in every sensitive fibre from the barbed reproaches of Marcella’s soft voice, and again turned aghast from what might perchance befall Eli Strobe. And then he vibrated to that other mood, his splendid physique rebounding from the harassments that sought to fix upon his strong nerves. His habit of robustly ignoring aught that did not jump with his humor; his imperious and independent poise; his impassivity to argument and the opinion of others; his arrogant arbitration of all matters according to his own absolute judgment, that recognized no alternative, no higher appeal, save his tyrannical interpretations of the Lord’s will, all renewed their tenure, and he was open anew to the influences of the present. Here and there his receptive fancy was struck by a great cairn of stones, fragments of rock split from the crags above by the riving frosts of immemorial winters, and he was reminded afresh of the altar that Jacob piled, and of the resting-places—which surely the Lord frequented—of this journeying man of eld.