A red light from the westward sun came through the thin growth opposite, and lay over the pond and the shore.

Little swarms of gnats danced in it.
A swarm of the little gauzy things, so slight and ephemeral that they seemed rather a symbolism of life than life itself, whirled before the boy's wild, tearful eyes, and he moved aside and looked down, and then cried out and snatched something from the ground at his feet.

It was the hat Abel Edwards had worn when he left home that morning.
Jerome stood holding his father's hat, gazing at it with a look in his face like an old man's.

Indeed, it may have been that a sudden old age of the spirit came in that instant over the boy.

He had not before conceived of anything but an accident happening to his father; now all at once he saw plainly that if his father, Abel Edwards, had come to his death in the pond it must have been through his own choice.