He speculated as he drove upon the rarity of human happiness. His father's life—how dull, how arduous, how ill-rewarded! Mayne's—how favorable from without, how hollow within! What undeserved calamity had visited Fetzer—foolish Fetzer to whom he had listened so obediently! What disappointment Levis had suffered! How little satisfaction he himself had had and with what high hope he had begun! But here was happiness within reach!
He noticed with sharpened observation as he drove north, those changes in the landscape with which he had been familiar in his youth; he would point them out sometime to Ellen. He drove rapidly and unweariedly, his depression passing, feeling that he understood the joy of the aviator. His route lay to the east of Chestnut Ridge, but he would see presently a country similar to that in which he had been born and had spent his youth.
He did not think of Hilda, sitting heavily by the shaded window; his thoughts leaped ahead. He drove on and on like one possessed.
"I could give her riches and ease and travel," he said to himself. "It wouldn't be an unfair exchange for youth." It may have been the gathering dusk, it may have been a springing breeze, but a cool wind seemed to blow across his very heart. To wait another five years or ten! He must have Ellen now.
He was tempted to stop as twilight fell, but he changed his mind. He had come to the point when fifty miles nearer her was a goal to be desired. He could reach her, he believed, before noon of the next day; he did not care where he slept or whether he ate. He had ceased to think of her good or of his own honor or of her father—he thought of but one matter.
"It won't hurt her to be kissed," he said to himself, smiling. His thoughts came disjointedly, sometimes they expressed themselves in single words—"Adorable" ... "hungry" ... "her dark eyes" ... "peace" ... Once he laughed aloud. "It won't hurt her mind, she'll blossom like a rose!" Sometimes he smiled grimly. Fate should not cheat him, let her set her trap never so well! There was, he believed, nothing between him and the satisfaction of his desire but a few hours of swift driving.
He was so occupied with his own thoughts that he did not realize till darkness was almost complete that he had taken a wrong turn. He stopped his car and got out, a tall gray figure in the dusk, and surveyed the landscape, and discovered that he had come into a country like the country of his youth. He could not look far in any direction, for low, bleak hills had closed in upon him. Through a cleft between two of them the sun cast a last reflected gleam. Seeing no dim human habitation, he studied the road—though it was little traveled, he believed that it would be best to go on. In the next valley there would doubtless be a village where they could set him straight. The pale light was on his left; the road led at least in the right direction. Then suddenly he smiled. Memory played queer tricks—a forgotten fragment of poetry, recited often by his father, surprised him:
"Naught in the distance but the evening, naught
To point my footsteps further! At the thought
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing, dragon-penned,
That brushed my cap—perchance the guide I sought."
He shivered suddenly. This was a sinister landscape; familiar as such scenes had been to him in his youth, he should not like to be held here for the night. Alas, his poor father had had no other landscape to look upon in all his latter years!