“Shall I send it?” asked the girl, when she had done it up.

“No, thanks; we are not in town.”

“Of course,” she said, beaming upon him; “nobody is yet.”

And this girl also seemed a part of the old life, with her little affectation of familiarity with its ways.

He went to his room—­it seemed a very mean little room now—­packed his bag, told the janitor he should be absent a few days, and hurried to the ferry and the train as if he feared that some accident would delay him.  When he was seated and the train moved off, his thoughts took another turn.  He was in for it now.

He began to regret that he had not delayed, to think it all out more thoroughly; perhaps it would have been better to have written.

He bought an evening journal, but he could not read it.  What he read between the lines was his own life.  What a miserable failure!  What a mess he had made of his own affairs, and how unworthy of such a woman as Edith he had been!  How indifferent he had been to her happiness in the pursuit of his own pleasure!  How would she receive him?  He could hardly doubt that; but she must know, she must have felt cruelly his estrangement.  What if she met him with a royal forgiveness, as if he were a returned prodigal?  He couldn’t stand that.  If now he were only going back with his fortune recovered, with brilliant prospects to spread before her, and could come into the house in his old playful manner, with the assumed deference of the master, and say:  “Well, Edith dear, the storm is over.  It’s all right now.  I am awfully glad to get home.  Where’s the rascal of an heir?”

Instead of that, he was going with nothing, humiliated, a clerk in a twine-store.  And not much of a clerk at that, he reflected, with his ready humorous recognition of the situation.

And yet he was for the first time in his life earning his living.  Edith would like that.  He had known all along that his idle life had been a constant grief to her.  No, she would not reproach him; she never did reproach him.  No doubt she would be glad that he was at work.  But, oh, the humiliation of the whole thing!  At one moment he was eager to see her, and the next the rattling train seemed to move too fast, and he welcomed every wayside stop that delayed his arrival.  But even the Long Island trains arrive some time, and all too soon the cars slowed up at the familiar little station, and Jack got out.

“Quite a stranger in these parts, Mr. Delancy,” was the easy salutation of the station-keeper.

“Yes.  I’ve been away.  All right down here?”

“Right as a trivet.  Hot summer, though.  Calculate it’s goin’ to be a warm fall—­generally is.”

It was near sunset.  When the train had moved on, and its pounding on the rails became a distant roar and then was lost altogether, the country silence so impressed Jack, as he walked along the road towards the sea, that he became distinctly conscious of the sound of his own footsteps.  He stopped and listened.  Yes, there were other sounds—­the twitter of birds in the bushes by the roadside, the hum of insects, and the faint rhythmical murmur of lapsing waves on the shore.