“Sincerely your friend, ...”

The young man sat there, dazed.

He had always known about those millions; the expectation of them had always vaguely dazzled his imagination, tampered more than he was aware with the sincerity of his feelings, with the reality of his life; but now the shower of gold had fallen all about him and his fancy stretched its eyes to take in the immediate glitter.

Why, thought Hilliard, this turns life upside down ...  I can begin to live ...  I can go East.  He saw that the world and its gifts were as truly his as though he were a fairy prince.  A sort of confusion of highly colored pictures danced through his quick and ignorant brain.  The blood pounded in his ears.  He got up and prowled about the little room.  It was oppressively small.  He felt caged.  The widest prairie would have given him scant elbow-room.  He was planning his trip to the East when the thought of Sheila first struck him like a cold wave ... or rather it was as if the wave of his selfish excitement had crashed against the wave of his desire for her.  All was foam and confusion in his spirit.  He was quite incapable of self-sacrifice—­a virtue in which his free life and his temperament had given him little training.  It was simply a war of impulses.  His instinct was to give up nothing—­to keep hold of every gift.  He wanted, as he had never in his life wanted anything before, to have his fling.  He wanted his birthright of experience.  He had cut himself off from all the gentle ways of his inheritance and lived like a very Ishmael through no fault of his own.  Now, it seemed to him that before he settled down to the soberness of marriage, he must take one hasty, heady, compensating draft of life, of the sort of life he might have had.  He would go East, go at once; he would fling himself into a tumultuous bath of pleasure, and then he would come back to Sheila and lay a great gift of gold at her feet.  He thought over his plans, reconstructing them.  He got pen and ink and wrote a letter to Sheila.  He wrote badly—­a schoolboy’s inexpressive letter.  But he told his story and his astounding news and drew a vivid enough picture of the havoc it had wrought in his simplicity.  He used a lover’s language, but his letter was as cold and lumpish as a golden ingot.  And yet the writer was not cold.  He was throbbing and distraught, confused and overthrown, a boy of fourteen beside himself at the prospect of a holiday ...  It was a stolen holiday, to be sure, a sort of truancy from manliness, but none the less intoxicating for that.  Cosme’s Latin nature was on top; Saxon loyalty and conscience overthrown.  He was an egoist to his finger-tips that night.  He did not sleep a wink, did not even try, but lay on his back across the bed, hands locked over his hair while “visions of sugar plums danced through his head.”  In the morning he went down and made his arrangements for Sheila, a little less complete, perhaps, than he had intended, for he met a worthy citizen of Rusty starting up the country with a sled to visit his traps and to him he gave the letter and confided his perplexities.  It was a hasty interview, for the stage was about to start.