he worked over the wide sands from one to another of the beds, where the flats were riddled as with buckshot holes, from which little jets of clear water now and then spurted up, bright in the sun. He took solace, not in the money he was laying up, but in the steady work with his hands that kept his lonely mind from running too much in strange channels. Always he hated, with a growing hate, the sea that he worked beside.
So things went on in these five years. Often he longed for some companion to step from the warm, lighted circle of human beings that he seemed to stand outside of, in the dark; yet as often as the chance came to talk, he found to his sorrow that he had no words, or few, or empty, and retreated as a ghost from among his kindly fellow beings. In this world there had been only his mother; in the next— But that was a further darkness, in which he found only sickening doubts. And meantime, as a young man often will, he could feel himself growing old.
One hot, bright noon, while he was retreating up the beach with his muddy bas-
