Beyond the wood, the winding ash-coloured road dipped into a hollow, and when he reached the brow of the low hill ahead, a west wind, which had risen suddenly from the river, caught up with his footsteps and raced on like a wild thing at his side.  He could hear it sighing plaintively in the bared trees he had left, or driving the hurtled leaves like a flock of frightened partridges over the sumach and sassafras, and then lashing itself into a frenzy as it chased over a level of broomsedge.  Always it sang of freedom—­of the savage desire and thirst for freedom—­of the ineffable, the supreme ecstasy of freedom!  And always while he listened to it, while he felt the dead leaves stinging his flesh, he told himself passionately that he “would not go back—­that he would not marry to-morrow!”

For hours he stalked with the wind.  Then, turning out of the road, he flung himself down on the broomsedge and lay for other hours gazing over the autumn landscape to the softly luminous band on the far horizon.  Somewhere in a darkened corner of his brain there was the resolve that he would not return until, like the freckled faced, barefooted boy, he had “had his day.”

At nine o’clock that night he entered an inn in the town of Briarwood, twenty miles north of Applegate, and sitting down at one of the tables, ordered something to eat.  His limbs ached, not from the walk in the wind, but from the passion that had whipped his body like a destroying fire.  He felt still the burning throb of the sore that it had left.  Apart from this dull agony he could feel nothing—­he could desire nothing—­he could remember nothing.  Everything was over except the instinct that told him that he was empty and must be fed.

While he sat there, with his aching forehead bowed in his hands, there came a light touch on his shoulder, and looking up he saw the Reverend Orlando Mullen, standing at his side like an embodiment of all the things from which he had fled.  For an instant he could only stare blindly back at him.  Then something which had opened in his soul, closed softly, as if it were a shell of custom, and he knew that he was again a prisoner.  With the sight of that conventional figure, the scattered instincts of habit and of respectability—­of all the qualities for which the race stood and against which the individual had rebelled—­all these rallied anew to the battlefield from which they had been routed by his insurgent emotions.

“I suppose you’re waiting, like myself, for the nine-forty-five train?”

“Yes, I’m waiting for the train.”

“Business brought you so far away?”

“Yes, business brought me.”  Lifting his glass of beer, he drained it slowly under Mr. Mullen’s friendly and curious eyes.

“It looks as if we should have a perfect day for the wedding,” remarked the rector, after a pause.  “Like you, I was called off on an urgent matter, but fortunately, it only means losing a little sleep.”