not face a final departure. He said he would return early in autumn for a few days, and at least once a year thereafter.
Then one hot morning, on sudden impulse, he left. As the car that was taking him to Exeter roared down the winding street, under the hot green leafiness of June, he heard, as from the sea-depth of a dream, far-faint, the mellow booming of the campus bell. And suddenly it seemed to him that all the beaten walks were thudding with the footfalls of lost boys, himself among them, running for their class. Then, as he listened, the far bell died away, and the phantom runners thudded into oblivion. Soon the car roared up by Vergil Weldon’s house, and as he passed, he saw the old man sitting below his tree.
Eugene stood up in the car and waved his long arm in a gesture of farewell.
“Good-bye,” he cried. “Good-bye.”
The old man stood up with a quiet salute of parting, slow, calm, eloquently tender.
Then, even while Eugene stood looking back upon the street, the car roared up across the lip of the hill, and drove steeply down into the hot parched countryside below. But as the lost world faded from his sight, Eugene gave a great cry of pain and sadness, for he knew that the elfin door had closed behind him, and that he would never come back again.
He saw the vast rich body of the hills, lush with billowing greenery, ripe-bosomed, dappled by far-floating cloud-shadows. But it was, he knew, the end.
Far-forested, the horn-note wound. He was wild with the hunger for release: the vast champaign of earth stretched out for him its limitless seduction.
It was the end, the end. It was the beginning of the voyage, the quest of new lands.
Gant was dead. Gant was living, death-in-life. In his big back room at Eliza’s he waited death, lost and broken in a semi-life of petulant memory. He hung to life by a decayed filament, a corpse lit by infrequent flares of consciousness. The sudden death whose menace they had faced so long that it had lost its meaning, had never come to him. It had come where they had least expected
