Lighting it he puffed slowly and deeply at it, exhaling the smoke lingeringly through his nostrils.

Then he sat down on a rock, leaned an elbow in the sand, pulled his hat brim well down over his eyes and with the cigarette held loosely between his lips, gave himself over to retrospection.
It all came to him, as he sat there on the rock, his gaze on the basking valley, his thoughts centered on that youth which had been an abiding nightmare.

The question was: What influence had made him a hardened, embittered, merciless demon of a man whose passions threatened always to wash away the dam of his self-control?
A man whose evil nature caused other men to shun him; a man who scoffed at virtue; who saw no good in anything?
Not once during his voluntary exile had he applied his mind to the subject in the hope of stumbling on a solution.

To be sure, he had had a slight glimmering of the truth; he had realized in a sort of vague, general way that he had not been treated fairly at home, but he had not been able to provide a definite and final explanation, perhaps because he had never considered it necessary.

But his return home, the review of the army of memories, had brought him a solution--the solution.