It had served its purpose, had fulfilled its mission, and those who once ruled it now were gone.

The wild herds and the wild men came there no longer, and there were neither hosts nor those needing hospitality.

And Mary Ellen, the stately visitant of his sleeping or his waking dreams, no longer might be seen in person at the Halfway House.

Recreant, defeated, but still refusing aid, she had gone back to her land of flowers.

It was Franklin's one comfort that she had never known into whose hands had passed--at a price far beyond their actual worth--the lands of the Halfway House, which had so rapidly built up for her a competency, which had cleared her of poverty, only to re-enforce her in her pride.
Under all the fantastic grimness, all the mysticism, all the discredited and riotous vagaries of his insubordinate soul, Franklin possessed a saving common sense; yet it was mere freakishness which led him to accept a vagrant impulse as the controlling motive at the crucial moment of his life.