Jerome had faced his rebuff without a whimper, and with a great stand of spirit, but now he could not go home and work in the garden, and tie his fiery revolt to the earth with spade and hoe.  He ran on up the road, until he passed the village and came to his woodland.  He followed the cart path through it, until he was near the boundary wall; then he threw himself down in the midst of some young brakes and little wild green things, and presently fell to weeping, with loud sobs, like a baby.

All day he had been strained up to an artificial height of manhood; now he had come down again to his helpless estate of boyhood.  In the solitude of the woods there is no mocking, and no despite for helplessness and grief.  The trees raising their heads in a great host athwart the sky, the tender plants beneath gathering into their old places with tumultuous silence, put to shame no outcry of any suffering heart of bird or beast or man.  To these unpruned and mother-fastnesses of the earth belonged at first the wailing infancy of all life, and even now a vague memory of it is left, like the organ of a lost sense, in the heart oppressed by the grief of the grown world.

The boy unknowingly had fled to his first mother, who had soothed his old sorrow in his heart before he had come into the consciousness of it.  Had Doctor Prescott at any minute surprised him, he would have faced him again, with no sign of weakening; but he lay there, curled up among the brakes as in a green nest, with his face against the earth, and her breath of aromatic moisture in his nostrils, and sobbed and wept until he fell asleep.

He had slept an hour and a half, when he wakened suddenly, with a clear “Hello!” in his ears.  He opened his eyes and looked up, dazed, into Squire Eben Merritt’s great blond face.

“Hullo!” said Squire Eben again.  “I thought it was a woodchuck, and instead of that it’s a boy.  What are you doing here, sir?”

Jerome raised himself falteringly.  He felt weak, and the confused misery of readjusting the load of grief under which one has fallen asleep was upon him.  “Guess I fell asleep,” he stammered.

“Guess you’d better not fall asleep in such a damp hole as this,” said the Squire, “or the rheumatism will catch your young bones.  Why aren’t you home planting, sir?  I thought you were a smart boy.”

“He’ll get it all; there ain’t any use!” said Jerome, with pitiful doggedness, standing ankle-deep in brakes before the Squire.  He rubbed his eyes, heavy with sleep and tears, and raised them, dull still, into the Squire’s face.

“Who do you mean by he?  Dr. Prescott?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then he didn’t approve of your plan?”

“He’s going to take our house, and let us live in it and pay rent, and if we can’t pay he’s going to take our wood-lot here—­” Suddenly Jerome gave a great sob; he flung himself down wildly.  “He sha’n’t have it; he sha’n’t—­he never shall!” he sobbed, and clutched at the brakes and held them to his bosom, as if he were indeed holding some dear thing against an enemy who would wrest it from him.