For some weeks now he had been missing Rowan; and this was the second cause of his restlessness and increasing loneliness.  The failure of Rowan’s love affair was a blow to him:  it had so linked him to the life of the young—­was the last link.  And since then he had looked for Rowan in vain; he had waited for him of mornings at his office, had searched for him on the streets, scanning all young men on horseback or in buggies; had tried to find him in the library, at the livery stable, at the bank where he was a depositor and director.  There was no ground for actual uneasiness concerning Rowan’s health, for Rowan’s neighbors assured him in response to his inquiries that he was well and at work on the farm.

“If he is in trouble, why does he not come and tell me?  Am I not worth coming to see?  Has he not yet understood what he is to me?  But how can he know, how can the young ever know how the old love them?  And the old are too proud to tell.”  He wrote letters and tore them up.

As we stand on the rear platform of a train and see the mountains away from which we are rushing rise and impend as if to overwhelm us, so in moving farther from his past very rapidly now, it seemed to follow him as a landscape growing always nearer and clearer.  His mind dwelt more on the years when hatred had so ruined him, costing him the only woman he had ever asked to be his wife, costing him a fuller life, greater honors, children to leave behind.

He was sitting alone in his rear office the middle of one afternoon, alone among his books.  He had outspread before him several that are full of youth.  Barbee was away, the street was very quiet.  No one dropped in—­perhaps all were tired of hearing him talk.  It was not yet the hour for Professor Hardage to walk in.  A watering-cart creaked slowly past the door and the gush of the drops of water sounded like a shower and the smell of the dust was strong.  Far away in some direction were heard the cries of school children at play in the street.  A bell was tolling; a green fly, entering through the rear door, sang loud on the dusty window-panes and then flew out and alighted on a plant of nightshade springing up rank at the doorstep.

He was not reading and his thoughts were the same old thoughts.  At length on the quiet air, coming nearer, were heard the easy roll of wheels and the slow measured step of carriage horses.  The sound caught his ear and he listened with quick eagerness.  Then he rose trembling and waited.  The carriage had stopped at the door; a moment later there was a soft low knock on the lintel and Mrs. Meredith entered.  He met her but she said:  “May I go in there?” and entered the private office.