but rather a hindrance; he recognized in the priest a deterring and detaining influence against which he rebelled, and which he wished to repudiate.  He was, as he had said so terribly, “home-sick for hell.”  He would go, and he would most inevitably be caught in the whirlpools; the naturalist, the scientist, the Butterfly Man, would be sucked into that boiling vortex and drowned beyond all hope of resuscitation; but from it the soul of Slippy McGee would emerge, with a larger knowledge and a clearer brain, a thousand-fold more deadly dangerous than of old; because this time he knew better and had deliberately chosen the evil and rejected the good.  By the law of the pendulum he must swing as far backward into wrong as he had swung forward into right.

I could not bring myself to speak to him, I dared not bid him the mockery of a Godspeed upon his journey, dreading as I did that journey’s end.  So I stood at a window and watched him as with suitcase in hand he walked down our shady street.  At the corner he turned and lifted his hat in a last farewell salute to my mother, standing looking after him in the Parish House gate.  Then he turned down the side-street, and so disappeared.

From his closed rooms came a long wailing howl.  For the first time Kerry might not follow his master; more yet, the master had thrust the astonished dog into his bedroom and shut the door upon him.  He had refused to recognize the scratch at the door, the snuffling whine through the keyhole.  The outer door had slammed.  Kerry raced to the window.  And the master was going, and going without him!  He had neither net, knapsack, nor bottle-belt, but he carried a suitcase.  He did not look back, nor whistle:  he meant to leave him behind.  Sensing that an untoward thing was occurring, a thing that boded no good to himself or his beloved, the red dog lifted his voice and howled a piercing protest.

The sash was down, but the blinds had not yet been closed to.  One saw Kerry standing with his forepaws on the window-sill, his nose against the glass, his ears lifted, his eyes anxious and distressed, his lip caught in his teeth.  At intervals he threw back his head, and then came the howls.

The catastrophe—­for to me it was no less a thing—­had come upon me so suddenly that I was fairly stunned.  From sheer force of habit I went over to the church and knelt before the altar; but I could not pray; I could only kneel there dumbly.  I heard the screech of the three o’clock express coming in, and, a few minutes later, its longer screech as it departed.  He had gone, then!  I was not dreaming it:  it was true.  Down and down and down went my heart.  And down and down and down went my head, humbled and prostrate.  Alas, the end of hope, the fall of pride!  Alas and alas for the fair house built upon the sand, wrecked and scattered!

When I rose from my knees I staggered.  I walked draggingly, as one walks with fetters upon the feet.  Oh, it was a cruel world, a world in which nothing but inevitable loss awaited one, in which one was foredoomed to disappointment; a world in which one was leaf by leaf stripped bare.