It was the boy and the meaning of his words which escaped me still, baffled me, and formed the whole subject of my attention, even when I was inside the Tern Creek church; so that I retain nothing of that, save a general quaintness, a general loneliness, a little deserted, forgotten token of human doings long since done, standing on its little acre of wilderness amid that solitude which suggests the departed presence of man, and which is so much more potent in the flavor of its desolation than the virgin wilderness whose solitude is still waiting for man to come.

It made no matter whether John had believed in the friend to whom I intended writing advice, or had seen through and accepted in good part my manoeuvre; he had considered my words, that was the point; and he had not slept in his bed, but on it, if sleep had come to him at all; this I found out while dressing.  Several times I read his note over.  “Between alternate injuries he may find it harder to choose.”  This was not an answer to me, but an explanation of his own perplexity.  At times it sounded almost like an appeal, as if he were saying, “Do not blame me for not being convinced;” and if it was such appeal, why, then, taken with his resolve to do right at any cost, and his night of inward contention, it was poignant.  “I believe that you will help your friend.”  Those words sounded better.  But—­“tell him a Southern gentleman ought to be shot either way.”  What was the meaning of this?  A chill import rose from it into my thoughts, but that I dismissed.  To die on account of Hortense!  Such a thing was not to be conceived.  And yet, given a high-strung nature, not only trapped by its own standards, but also wrought upon during many days by increasing exasperation and unhappiness while helpless in the trap, and with no other outlook but the trap:  the chill import returned to me more than once, and was reasoned away, as, with no attention to my surroundings, I took a pair of oars, and got into a boat belonging to the lodge, and rowed myself slowly among the sluggish windings of Tern Creek.

Whence come those thoughts that we ourselves feel shame at?  It shamed me now, as I pulled my boat along, that I should have thoughts of John which needed banishing.  What tale would this be to remember of a boy’s life, that he gave it to buy freedom from a pledge which need never have been binding?  What pearl was this to cast before the sophisticated Hortense?  Such act would be robbed of its sadness by its absurdity.  Yet, surely, the bitterest tragedies are those of which the central anguish is lost amid the dust of surrounding paltriness.  If such a thing should happen here, no one but myself would have seen the lonely figure of John Mayrant, standing by the window and looking out into the dark quiet of the wood; his name would be passed down for a little while as the name of a fool, and then he would be forgotten.  “I believe that you will help your friend.”  Yes; he had certainly