Nancy looked at me in surprise.  She was always downright.

“Oh, Hugh, doesn’t your father mean to put you in business?” she exclaimed.

A hot flush spread over my face.  Even to her I had not betrayed my apprehensions on this painful subject.  Perhaps it was because of this very reason, knowing me as she did, that she had divined my fate.  Could my father have spoken of it to anyone?

“Not that I know of,” I said angrily.  I wondered if she knew how deeply she had hurt me.  The others laughed.  The colour rose in Nancy’s cheeks, and she gave me an appealing, almost tearful look, but my heart had hardened.  As soon as supper was over I left the table to wander, nursing my wrongs, in a far corner of the garden, gay shouts and laughter still echoing in my ears.  I was negligible, even my pathetic subterfuge had been detected and cruelly ridiculed by these friends whom I had always loved and sought out, and who now were so absorbed in their own prospects and happiness that they cared nothing for mine.  And Nancy!  I had been betrayed by Nancy!...  Twilight was coming on.  I remember glancing down miserably at the new blue suit I had put on so hopefully for the first time that afternoon.

Separating the garden from the street was a high, smooth board fence with a little gate in it, and I had my hand on the latch when I heard the sound of hurrying steps on the gravel path and a familiar voice calling my name.

“Hugh!  Hugh!”

I turned.  Nancy stood before me.

“Hugh, you’re not going!”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why?”

“If you don’t know, there’s no use telling you.”

“Just because I said your father intended to put you in business!  Oh, Hugh, why are you so foolish and so proud?  Do you suppose that anyone—­that I—­think any the worse of you?”

Yes, she had read me, she alone had entered into the source of that prevarication, the complex feelings from which it sprang.  But at that moment I could not forgive her for humiliating me.  I hugged my grievance.

“It was true, what I said,” I declared hotly.  “My father has not spoken.  It is true that I’m going to college, because I’ll make it true.  I may not go this year.”

She stood staring in sheer surprise at sight of my sudden, quivering passion.  I think the very intensity of it frightened her.  And then, without more ado, I opened the gate and was gone....

That night, though I did not realize it, my journey into a Far Country was begun.

The misery that followed this incident had one compensating factor.  Although too late to electrify Densmore and Principal Haime with my scholarship, I was determined to go to college now, somehow, sometime.  I would show my father, these companions of mine, and above all Nancy herself the stuff of which I was made, compel them sooner or later to admit that they had misjudged me.  I had been possessed by similar resolutions before, though none so strong, and they had a way of sinking below the surface of my consciousness, only to rise again and again until by sheer pressure they achieved realization.