Daylight found Justus Hoxon far on the road to the mountains. In the many miles, as he fared along, his thoughts could hardly have been pleasant company. As he sought to discover fault or flaw in himself, search as he might, he could find naught that might palliate the flippant faithlessness of his beloved, or the treachery of his brother. His ambition might have been too worldly a thing, but not a pulse of that most vital emotion beat for himself. He realized it now--he realized his life in looking back upon this completed episode, as he might have done in the hour of death. He had so expended himself in the service of others that there was naught left for him. He had no gratulation in it, no sense of the virtue of unselfishness, no preception of achievement; it only seemed to him that his was the most flagrant folly that ever left a man in the world, but with no place in it. A sorry object for pride he seemed to himself, but he quivered, and scorched, and writhed in its hot flames. His one object was to take himself out of the sight and sound of Colbury, till he might have counsel within himself, and perfect his scheme of revenge--not upon the woman. Poor Theodosia, with her limitations, could hardly have conceived how she had shattered the ideal to which her image had conformed in his mind, as she had stood on the porch and vaunted her beauty, and her belief in its power, and her pitiful ambitions. The woman was heartily welcome to the lot she had chosen. But the treacherous man,--it was not in Justus Hoxon's scheme of things to receive a blow and return nothing. A "hardy fighter" he was esteemed, albeit his prowess was eclipsed by his more peaceful virtues. This, however, should be returned in kind. He would make no attack to be put in the wrong, arrested, perhaps, after the Colbury interpretation of assault and battery. But Walter had many a weak point in his armor, glaringly apparent now to the once fond brother. Only a surly, bitter word he had for greeting to the few neighbors whom he met, and who went their way in the conviction that his brother had lost his election; for none ascribed any emotion of Justus Hoxon's to his own sake.