He got up with his hand going instinctively to his back to ease the ache there, and went out upon the porch and stood looking drearily down upon the asphalted street, where the white paths of speeding automobiles slashed the dusk like runaway sunbeams on a frolic.  Then the street lights winked and sputtered and began to glow with white brilliance.

Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado!  Peter knew what the doctor had in mind.  Vast plains, unpeopled, pure, immutable in their calm; stars that came down at night and hung just over your head, making the darkness alive with their bright presence; a little cottage hunched against a hill, a candle winking cheerily through the window at the stars; the cries of night birds, the drone of insects, the distant howling of a coyote; far away on the boundary of your possessions, a fence of barbed wire stretching through a hollow and up over a hill; distance and quiet and calm, be it day or night.  And Helen May coming through the sunlight, riding a gentle-eyed pony; Helen May with her deep-gold hair tousled in the wind, and with health dancing in her eyes that were the color of a ripe chestnut, odd contrast to her hair; Helen May with the little red spots gone from her cheek bones, and with tanned skin and freckles on her nose and a laugh on her lips, coming up at a gallop with the sun behind her, and something more; with sickness behind her and the drudgery of eight hours in an office, and poverty and unhappiness.  And Vic—­yes, Vic in overalls and a straw hat, growing up to be the strong man he never would be in the city.

Like many another commonplace man of the towns, for all his colorless ways and his thinning hair and his struggle against poverty, Peter was something of a dreamer.  And like all the rest of us who build our dreams out of wishes and hopes and maybes, Peter had not a single fact to use in his foundation.  Arizona, New Mexico or Colorado—­to Peter they were but symbols of all those dear unattainable things he longed for.  And that he longed for them, not for himself but for another who was very dear to him, only made the longing keener and more tragic.

CHAPTER TWO

IN WHICH PETER DISCOVERS A WAY OUT

We are always exclaiming over the strange way in which events link themselves together in chains; and when the chains bind us to a certain condition or environment, we are in the habit of blandly declaring ourselves victims of the force of circumstances.  By that rule, Peter found himself being swept into a certain channel of thought about which events began at once to link themselves into a chain which drew him perforce into a certain path that he must follow.  Or it may have been his peculiar single-mindedness that forced him to follow the path; however that may be, circumstances made it easy.