When the door closed on Rupert the master pulled down the blind, and, trimming his lamp, tried to compose himself by reading.

Outside, the "Great Day for Indian Spring" was slowly evaporating in pale mists from the river, and the celebration itself spasmodically taking flight here and there in Roman candles and rockets.

An occasional outbreak from revellers in the bar-room below, a stumbling straggler along the planked sidewalk before the hotel, only seemed to intensify the rustic stillness.

For the future of Indian Spring was still so remote that Nature insensibly re-invested its boundaries on the slightest relaxation of civic influence, and Mr.Ford lifted his head from the glowing columns of the "Star" to listen to the far-off yelp of a coyote on the opposite shore.
He was also conscious of the recurrence of that vague, pleasurable recollection, so indefinite that, when he sought to identify it with anything--even the finding of the myrtle sprays on his desk--it evaded him.

He tried to work, with the same interruption.