Now that he was so near to Celia his heart misgave him. How would she receive him, coming home to her a tramp, a dusty, tired, footsore tramp, wet, chilled to the bone, footsore and tired! So tired! He forged ahead, trying hard to throw off these thoughts. It was the scornful negroes who had engendered them. A mile from Harrodsburg he came to the toll gate. A woman whose yellow hair showed streaks of gray, raised the pole for him, smiling at him. "That man had eyes like Seth Lawsons," she said to her husband, who smoked his pipe on the porch while she raised and lowered the poles and so supported the family. She was the girl who had called good-by after Celia years before, when she left for her journey to the West and the Magic City. * * * * * It was twilight when Seth came to Celia's gate. A woman sat alone on the step of the portico, looking out down the pike. Seth paused, his hand on the latch, seeing which the woman shook her head negatively. Seth raised the latch, whereupon she suddenly stood, frowning. "I have nothing for you," she called out raspingly. "There is not a thing in the house to eat. Go away! Go away!" "Celia!" Seth cried out, stabbed to the heart. "I am not a beggar for bread, but give me a crust of kindness for the love of God! I am Seth." CHAPTER XXIV. [Illustration] Seen from afar off by the loving eyes of memory, the cows' horns are longer than they are close by. The kitchen was old and smoky. Once on a time it had been regularly calcimined, twice a year, or three times, but it had been many years now since it had undergone this cleanly process. Celia's welcome of Seth had been according to her nature, all the more hardened now by seclusion and poverty. She heard without emotion of the death of the child. It mattered little to her. She had never known him. Seth, come back to her a failure, a tramp, was deserving of scant courtesy. She meted it out to him as it seemed to her he deserved. The miles he had travelled counted little. Since he had proven himself too great a failure to travel as men do, it was only just that he should work his way, sleep in fence corners, live on crusts and walk. It was one of her theories that, given sufficient time, all men and animals sink to their level. Who was Seth that he should be exempt from this law? The thought occurred to her that he had come to her as a last recourse. That, unable to make his own living, he had come to share hers. That thought scarcely served to add warmth to her welcome. Seth sat on a chair against the blackened wall in the position of the tramp who has covered weary distances, whose every bone aches with the extreme intensity of fatigue. He was like a rag that had been thrown there.