An odd feeling took possession of him when he found himself once more, after three years, on the scene of his struggles. It did not seem so long ago. That he had greatly changed he knew; since the days of furnace-tending, and study, and work as a surfman, and all the other interests that had crowded those earlier years, he had thrown himself out into the world. He had come to know something of the joy of directing men and events, of playing a positive part in the life about him. He had come to love the fighting, to love the play of fact upon fact and mind upon mind. During the last year he had begun to understand the feeling of the trained swimmer when he plunges into deep water. There was the exhilaration, not only of keeping afloat where weak men sink, but of laying a course and following it, sure of his strength and endurance. While this change was taking place in him he had been inclined to forget that these three years were, after all, but a ninth or tenth part of his life so far, and that the other nine-tenths were also a fact. But to-night, as he walked up toward the Ridge where the big houses stood, he felt that he was taking up his old life where he had laid it down that day when he took the boat for Wauchung. And somehow he was not so sure of himself as he had been when he said good-morning to the cashier. He was almost relieved to find that Miss Davies and her mother had stepped across the way. They would be back soon, he was told; so he went in, left his hat and coat in the hall, and walked in through the parlour to the long sitting-room, where there were rows upon rows of books and a round-edged table covered with other books and with magazines, and a great fireplace with a wood fire burning to take the edge off the evening air. He sat down in the Morris chair by the table and picked up a book--he had not had time to read much of late years. But after a moment of turning the pages the book was lowered to his knees and his eyes looked over it at the fire. There had been a time when he had laid that fire regularly every morning, and now to be sitting here, suddenly conscious that his life had taken a new direction, that he was older, and that his clothes were better--that he was, in fact, another person altogether--was odd and haunting, was almost disconcerting.