Lane crossed the station platform, and the railroad yard and tracks, to make a short cut in the direction of his home.  He shrank from meeting any one.  He had not sent word just when he would arrive, though he had written his mother from New York that it would be soon, He was glad that no one belonging to him had been at the station.  He wanted to see his mother in his home.  Walking fast exhausted him, and he had to rest.  How dead his legs felt!  In fact he felt queer all over.  The old burn and gnaw in his breast had expanded to a heavy, full, suffocating sensation.  Yet his blood seemed to race.  Suddenly an overwhelming emotion of rapture flooded over him.  Home at last!  He did not think of any one.  He was walking across the railroad yards where as a boy he had been wont to steal rides on freight trains.  Soon he reached the bridge.  In the gathering twilight he halted to clutch at the railing and look out across where the waters met—­where Sycamore Creek flowed into Middleville River.  The roar of water falling over the dam came melodiously and stirringly to his ears.  And as he looked again he was assailed by that strange sense of littleness, of shrunkenness, which had struck him so forcibly at the station.  He listened to the murmur of running water.  Then, while the sweetness of joy pervaded him, there seemed to rise from below or across the river or from somewhere the same strange misgiving, a keener dread, a chill that was not in the air, a fatal portent of the future.  Why should this come to mock him at such a sacred and beautiful moment?

Passers-by stared at Lane, and some of them whispered, and one hesitated, as if impelled to speak.  Wheeling away Lane crossed the bridge, turned up River Street, soon turned off again into a darker street, and reaching High School Park he sat down to rest again.  He was almost spent.  The park was quiet and lonely.  The bare trees showed their skeleton outlines against the cold sky.  It was March and the air was raw and chilly.  This park that had once been a wonderful place now appeared so small.  Everything he saw was familiar yet grotesque in the way it had become dwarfed.  Across the street from where he sat lights shone in the windows of a house.  He knew the place.  Who lived there?  One of the girls—­he had forgotten which.  From somewhere the discordance of a Victrola jarred on Lane’s sensitive ears.

Lifting his bag he proceeded on his way, halting every little while to catch his breath.  When he turned a corner into a side street, recognizing every tree and gate and house, there came a gathering and swelling of his emotions and he began to weaken and shake.  He was afraid he could not make it half way up the street.  But he kept on.  The torture now was more a mingled rapture and grief than the physical protest of his racked body.  At last he saw the modest little house—­and then he stood at the gate, quivering.  Home!  A light in the window of his old room!  A terrible and tremendous