After the adventure on the shore, Marden knew himself for a man apart from other men. Yet it had renewed his purposes within him. He must be steadfast to a memory, and the Sebright blood must die out of his veins. All winter he hammered at these thoughts. The spring drew on, when the cakes of ice came floating down in the black water, and a brown haze covered the horizon, and the patches of snow melted from under the firs and cedars, and the thin, black crescent lines of geese quivered northward in the sky, and the air was filled with the pungent, resinous smoke of brushwood fires, and the fields turned slowly from buff to green, and mayflowers grew again, and dandelions, and later the twin-flowers that Marden's mother had taught him to love. There were long, comforting walks in the warm air; now that he felt the settled calm of knowing himself irretrievably alone, the return of spring seemed no longer a cruel mechanism of nature. Summer found him at work again on the beach, pausing now and then to look shoreward, with a kind of sad beatitude, at the house that he guarded.
