Along with this conviction of his powerlessness there came to him a new sense of reliance upon Nancy.  Unconsciously at first he turned to her for sunlight, big views and quiet power, for the very stimulus he had been wont to draw from the wide, high reaches of his far-off valley.  Later, came a conscious turning, an open-eyed bringing of all his needs, to lay them in her waiting lap.  Then it was he saw that on that first night at Edom her confidence and enthusiasm had been things he leaned upon quite naturally, though unwittingly.  The knowledge brought him a vague unrest.  Furtive, elusive impulses, borne to him on the wings of certain old memories—­memories once resolutely put away in the face of his one, big world-desire—­now came to trouble him.

It seemed that one must forever go in circles.  With fine courage he had made straight off to toil up the high difficult paths of the ideal.  Never had he consciously turned, nor even swerved.  Yet here he was at length upon his old tracks, come again to the wondering girl.

Did it mean, then, that his soul was baffled—­or did it mean that his soul would not suffer him to baffle it, try as he might?  Was that girl of the old days to greet him with her wondering eyes at the end of every high path?  These and many other questions he asked himself.

At the close of this day he sought her, eager for the light of her understanding eyes—­for a certain waiting sympathy she never withheld.  As she looked up now with a kind of composed gladness, it seemed to him that they two alone, out of all the world, were sanely quiet.  Silently he sank into a chair near her and they sat long thus, feeling no need of words.  At last she spoke.

“Are you coming nearer to it, Bernal?”

He laughed.

“I’m farther away than ever, Nance.  Probably there’s but one creature in this city to-day as out of place as I am.  He’s a big, awkward, country-looking dog, and he was lost on Broadway.  Did you ever see a lost dog in a city street?  This fellow was actually in a panic, wholly demoralised, and yet he seemed to know that he must conceal it for his own safety.  So he affected a fine air of confidence, of being very busy about an engagement for which he feared he might be late.  He would trot swiftly along for half a block, then pause as if trying to recall the street number; then trot a little farther, and stop to look back as if the other party to his engagement might happen along from that direction.  It was a splendid bit of acting, and it deceived them all, in that street of mutterers and hard faces.  He was like one of them, busy and hurried, but apparently cool, capable, and ominously alert.  Only, in his moments of indecision, his eyes shifted the least bit nervously, as if to note whether the real fear he felt were detected, and then I could read all his secret consternation.

“I’m the same lost dog, Nance.  I feel as he felt every time I go into that street where the poor creatures hurry and talk to themselves from sheer nervous fatigue.”