little?  It’s just the little fight for enough to eat and wear that’s getting the better of me that was a man, and able to do a man’s work in the world.  Now it has come to this!  Here I am runnin’ away from a woman because she wants me to pay her three dollars, and I am afraid of another woman because—­I’ve been and fooled away a few hundred dollars I had in the savings-bank.  I’m afraid—­yes, it has come to this.  I am afraid, afraid, and I’d run away out of life if I knew where it would fetch me to.  I’m afraid of things that ain’t worth being afraid of, and it’s all over things that’s beneath me.”  There came over Andrew, with his mouth to the moist earth, feeling the breath and the fragrance of it in his nostrils, a realization of the great motherhood of nature, and a contempt for himself which was scorching and scathing before it.  He felt that he came from that mighty breast which should produce only sons of might, and was spending his whole life in an ignominy of fruitless climbing up mole-hills.  “Why couldn’t I have been more?” he asked himself.  “Oh, my God, is it my fault?” He said to himself that if he had not yielded to the universal law and longing of his kind for a home and a family, it might have been better.  He asked himself that question which will never be answered with a surety of correctness, whether the advancement of the individual to his furthest compass is more to the glory of life than the blind following out of the laws of existence and the bringing others into the everlasting problem of advance.  Then he thought of Ellen, and a great warmth of conviction came over the loving heart of the man; all his self-contempt vanished.  He had her, this child who was above pearls and rubies, he had her, and in her the furthest reach of himself and progression of himself to greater distances than he could ever have accomplished in any other way, and it was a double progress, since it was not only for him, but also for the woman he had married.  A great wave of love for Fanny came over him.  He seemed to see that, after all, it was a shining road by which he had come, and he saw himself upon it like a figure of light.  He saw that he lived and could never die.  Then, as with a remorseless hurl of a high spirit upon needle-pricks of petty cares, he thought again of the dressmaker, of the money for Ellen’s watch, of the butcher’s bill, and the grocer’s bills, and the money which he had taken from the bank, and again he cowered beneath and loathed his ignoble burden.  He dug his hot head into the grass.  “Oh, my God! oh, my God!” he groaned.  He fairly sobbed.  Then he felt a soft wind of feminine skirts caused by the sudden stoop of some one beside him, and Ellen’s voice, shrill with alarm, rang in his ears.  “Father, what is the matter?  Father!”

Such was the man’s love for the girl that his first thought was for her alarm, and he pushed all his own troubles into the background with a lightning-like motion.  He raised himself hastily, and smiled at her with his pitiful, stiff face.  “It’s nothing at all, Ellen, don’t you worry,” he said.