Ah, if one could promise any
one better luck, if one could assure a single human being of happiness!
He had thought he could do so, once; and it was thinking of that that he
at last fell asleep. In his sleep, as if it had nothing fresher to work
upon, his mind went back and tortured itself with something years and
years away, an old, long-forgotten sorrow of his childhood.
When Alexander awoke in the morning, the sun was just rising through
pale golden ripples of cloud, and the fresh yellow light was vibrating
through the pine woods. The white birches, with their little unfolding
leaves, gleamed in the lowlands, and the marsh meadows were already
coming to life with their first green, a thin, bright color which
had run over them like fire. As the train rushed along the trestles,
thousands of wild birds rose screaming into the light. The sky was
already a pale blue and of the clearness of crystal. Bartley caught
up his bag and hurried through the Pullman coaches until he found the
conductor. There was a stateroom unoccupied, and he took it and set
about changing his clothes. Last night he would not have believed that
anything could be so pleasant as the cold water he dashed over his head
and shoulders and the freshness of clean linen on his body.
After he had dressed, Alexander sat down at the window and drew into his
lungs deep breaths of the pine-scented air. He had awakened with all his
old sense of power. He could not believe that things were as bad with
him as they had seemed last night, that there was no way to set them
entirely right.
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