Morbid people are probably as incomprehensible to themselves as to others.  The world is viewed by each through the medium of his own ill-adjusted temperament.  Objects are seen in a strangely tinted light, which is more than suspected to be delusive, yet cannot be decolorized.  Barwood’s vision was affected by such a distorting influence.  He discovered subtle meanings in ordinary things or circumstances, in the manner of a nod from an acquaintance or the tone of a remark, and brooded over them.  He continually scrutinized and questioned his own motives and those of others.

The mind of every human being is a puzzle to every other.  With what is it occupied when left to its own devices?  There is, in Barwood’s handwriting,[1] proof that his brain was filled with a procession of changing activities and impressions which were for the most part melancholy,—­aspirations for fame, distrust in his own powers, forecasting of probabilities, repining for past sins and follies, rage and epithets for imaginary meetings with enemies.  In the midst of all there were moments of perfect peace made up of reminiscences of a high-porticoed house, the grass-grown wheel-tracks and the sandy beach of the village on the Connecticut coast where his early home had been.  His fancies were rich and full, but slightly chaotic.  So also his will was strong and imperious at times, but vacillating.

It could not be said that he was not ambitious He would have desired success in order to secure a kindly recognition and to obviate the jars and harshness of life.  But no one prevailing impulse had ever enlisted his full powers.  He saved money, with a general indefinite notion of some day becoming a capitalist, and also gave much time to studies of various sorts.  He learned music among the rest, after coming of age, and composed music of his own, using as an inspiration a favorite poem, picture, or character.  These compositions were marked by a quaintness like that—­if a comparison may be made to something tangible—­, of a Chinese vase or a broken bronze figure.  His family, the Barwoods, had been from the earliest times a race of shrewd and driving New England storekeepers, the very antipodes of sentiment and dilettanteism.  Such incongruities are among the compensations of nature.  The Holbrook farm was the one locality, and Nina Holbrook the one figure, in the generally sombre prospect which Barwood saw about him, that gleamed in sunshine.  By the interposition of Mars Brown these also were presently shadowed.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  From entries in a carefully kept diary.]

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III.

THE SEARCH.