aloud at the figure he had cut; sometimes he felt the deepest degradation. He was vexed, feverish, thrown out of his reckoning. "It happens to everyone," he kept telling himself; but that was just the trouble,—why should a thing so common, so laughably simple, so short in point of time, take on this enormous proportion in his life? And why did he seem now so much weaker and coarser? Not till late that night did he find himself calm again and fit to go indoors.
At last, addressing the stars, he said, "Captain Harlow was right about them."
And he opened the door and went in.
V
THE SINGING IN THE HOUSE
After this, a year went by without further incident,—a summer of hard work, a winter of desperate sitting about and staring out of the window at snowfields and white-caps, of reading again the few books that had been his mother's, of pacing up and down like a wolf before the closed door of the other room.
