Supper was eaten in silence.  When it was over, Gideon Rand sat with his back against a pine and smoked his pipe.  His son went down to the river and stretched his length upon a mossed and lichened boulder.  The deep water below the stone did not give him back himself as had done the streamlet five days before.  This was a river, marred with eddies and with drifting wood, and red with the soil.  The evening wind was blowing, and the sycamore above him cast its bronze leaves into the flood which sucked them under, or bore them with it on its way to the larger river and the ultimate sea.  This stream had no babbling voice; its note was low and grave.  Youth and mountain sources forgotten, it hearkened before the time to ocean voices.  The boy, idle upon the lichened stone, listened too, to distant utterances, to the sirens singing beyond the shadowy cape.  The earth soothed him; he lay with half shut eyes, and after the day’s hot communion with old wrongs, he felt a sudden peace.  He was at the turn; the brute within him quiet behind the eternal bars; the savage receding, the man beckoning, the after man watching from afar.  The inner stage was cleared and set for a new act.  He had lowered the light, he had rested, and he had filled the interval with forms and determinations beautiful and vague, vague as the mists, the sounds, the tossed arms of the Ossian he had dared to open last night, before his father, by the camp-fire of the mountaineers.  In the twilight of his theatre he rested; a shadowy figure, full of mysteries, full of possibilities, a boy in the grasp of the man within him, neither boy nor man unlovable, nor wholly unadmirable, both seen, and seeing, “through a glass darkly.”

He turned on his side, and the light went up sharply.  A man riding a beautiful and spirited horse was coming over the hilltop.  Horse and rider paused a moment upon the crest, standing clear against the eastern sky.  In the crystal air and the sunset glow they crowned the hill like a horse and rider nobly done in bronze.  A moment thus, then they began to pick their way down the rocky road.  Lewis Rand looked, and started to his feet.  That horse had been bred in Albemarle, and that horseman he had met in Richmond.  The boy’s heart beat fast and the colour surged to his cheek.  There was little, since the hour in the bookshop, that he would not have done or suffered for the approaching figure.  All along the road from Richmond his imagination had conjured up a score of fantastic instances, in each of which he had rescued, or died for, or had in some impossibly romantic and magnificent fashion been the benefactor of the man who was drawing near to the river and camp-fire.  As superbly generous as any other youth, he was, at present, in his progress through life, in the land of shrines.  He must have his idol, must worship and follow after some visible hero, some older, higher, stronger, more subtle-fine and far-ahead adventurer.  Heretofore, in his limited