Day swept up the sky, and the blazoning sun whirled from the heart of the hills. Now, at last, Oman opened his eyes, sat up, looked around—stared, indeed, and all at once remembered fully. For the moment memory unnerved him. Then the strain proved again too great; and, with a renewed sense of dulness, he rose. The bird was gone. He seemed to have known that before. He wished now to discover his whereabouts. In the darkness he had reached the end of the ravine, and was at the edge of a long, barren slope, to the west of Bágh. The houses of the town began not far away. He could see people moving about there; and the sight of them reminded him that he was hungry. He felt faint, a little weak, and shaken, with the after effects of last night’s tumult. He determined not to enter Bágh. With an undefined weight of grief and ruin upon him, he began to toil upward along the slope, turning his face to the north, where the high hills rose. And, as he went, he ate the millet-loaf that Hushka had put into his hand. It was a fair morning, hot, cloudless, blazing. Oman wilted in the heat, but his steps went on, mechanically. He had already determined in his mind to reach the hills that day. As he went, he found his thoughts groping vaguely in once-accustomed ways: loneliness—fear of people—hatred of those that shunned him—hunger—physical discomfort—all the old details of that solitude that he knew so well. And still his feet did not falter. It was his masculine nature that upheld him now; but, adding to his dread, he felt the feminine, knocking—knocking at his heart, at his brain; and he fought desperately against admittance, knowing that, when it came, his suffering would be trebly increased. His old training with Hushka stood him in good stead to-day. He made progress. By noon, seven miles stretched between him and Bágh, and he was now among the foothills of the great Vindhyas, which, so far as he knew, stretched eastward before him into infinity. In this thought there was something like comfort. Those dark-wooded wilds meant refuge from men and the haunts of men. There should be no day in his life to come when he would not be able to plunge into some deep ravine, or mount some thickly jungled steep, knowing, in his heart, that whither he went no curious, human eyes could rest on him, no living creature follow. He felt just now that never again, while he was doomed to remain on earth, would he suffer a glance from human eyes. At noon, after a few moments’ rest, Oman plunged into the woods and began to move upward to the heights. The underbrush was not too thick to prevent progress; and the trunks of young trees afforded grasping-places for his hands. In this sort of country snakes were supposed to abound; but he moved on without any fear of them. No wild thing would molest him. Only man he feared.