He thought of all those years, and then he turned his head upon the pillow and faced through widely opened windows the misty, fragrant morning.

His mind turned with suddenness to a morning two summers past.

His father, who had lived to take grim pride in the son he had been used to thwart, was six months dead, and he himself was living alone, as he yet lived alone, in the small house upon the Three-Notched Road.

He lived there with his ambitions, which were many.

That morning he had gone, without knowing why, down through the tobacco-field to the stream which parted his patrimony from his neighbour's grassy orchard.