There was no sleep for the schoolmaster that night.  With folded arms he paced his room in restless misery.  Now that the die was cast, the ideal Miss Blakely faded from his mind; he felt instinctively that she was mythical.  He saw clearly that he had forfeited the best possibilities of life for the sake of temporary convenience, that he had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.

The long night passed at length, as all nights pass.  The sun rose over purple hills to glow upon the spring-stirred forest and to send golden shafts deep down into the clear heart of lake and stream.  The fallen beauty of past woodland summers had tinged the water till it glowed like nut-brown wine; so brown it was that the pools of the river, where it swirled and rushed past the schoolhouse bend, seemed to greet the sun with the soft dark glances of fawn-eyed water-sprites.  The glorious sky, the tender colours of the budding wood, the very dandelions on the untrimmed bank, contrived their hues to accord and rejoice with the laughing water, and the birds swelled out its song.  In the rapture of spring and of morning there was no echo of grief; for the unswerving law of nature, moving through the years, had set each thing in its right home.  It is only the perplexed soul that is forced to choose its own way and suffer from the choice, and the song of our life is but set to the accompaniment of a sad creed if we may not trust that, above our human wills, there is a Power able to overrule the mistakes of true hearts, to lead the blind by unseen paths, and save the simple from their own simplicity.

Very early in the morning the schoolmaster, haggard and worn, slipped out of his own door to refresh himself in the sunlight that gleamed down upon his bit of green through the budding willow trees that grew by the river-side.  He stood awhile under the bending boughs, watching the full stream as it tossed its spray into the lap of the flower-fringed shore.  He looked, as he stood there, like a ghost of the preceding night, caught against his will and embraced by the joyous morning.  Just then he had a vision.

A girl came towards him across the grass and stood a few paces distant.  The slender willow twigs, with their hanging catkins and tiny golden leaves, made a sort of veil between them.  She was very beautiful, at least so the schoolmaster thought; perhaps she was the personification of the morning, perhaps she was a wood-nymph—­it did not matter much; he felt, in his excitement and exhaustion, that her beauty and grace were not real, but only an hallucination of moving sun and shade.  She took the swaying willow-twigs in her pretty hands and looked through them at him and stroked the downy flowers.

‘Why did you send me that letter?’ she said at last, with a touch of severity in her voice.

‘The letter,’ he stammered, wondering what she could mean.

He remembered, with a sort of dull return of consciousness, that he was guilty of having sent a letter—­terribly guilty in his own estimation—­but it was sent to Miss Blakely, and this was not Miss Blakely.  That one letter had so completely absorbed all his mind that he had quite forgotten any others that he might have written in the course of his whole life.