Vance did not afterward recall how the discussion ended. He only knew that dusk had fallen when he and Mrs. Tracy at length left the house. As they turned down the lane they saw the lights of the high road, and the illuminated trolleys jogging by. Mrs. Tracy got into one and disappeared.

Vance sat down under a road lamp and pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. He wrote on it: "I don't want these; I'll never go back there," wrapped the keys in the paper, and addressed it to Mrs. Tarrant. Then he caught the next trolley, and was carried as far as it went in the direction of Eaglewood. He meant to walk up there and leave the keys for her; after that he would see. The late August night was hushed but not oppressive; the stars already seemed to hang higher than in midsummer, as if receding to autumn altitudes; as he climbed there was a stir of air in the upper branches. The walk might help to clear the confusion from his brain; at any rate, it was out of the question to follow Mrs. Tracy home. First of all he had to be by himself, and in the open… .

The Eaglewood gate was unlatched, and he walked along the drive to the house. It lay low and spreading under mysterious tree shadows, and he thought of the day when he had been caught asleep in the broken-down motor, and brought there, a bewildered culprit, by the scandalized Jacob. Every step was thick with memories which in the making had worn no special look of happiness, but were now steeped in it. He remembered how ashamed and angry he had been when Jacob had shoved him into the hall among those unknown people… .

Through the canopy of foliage one or two lights peeped from the upper panes, but the lower floor was dark, the shutters were not closed. Perhaps everybody was still out. Silence and night seemed stealing unnoticed into the empty rooms, and Vance would have liked to open one of the windows and enter too… . But as he stood on the lawn, a little way off, a light appeared in one of the drawing room windows, and he heard a few chords struck on the piano, and voices rising and falling. Without looking to see who was in the room he hurried back into the shade of the drive, and dropped the keys into the letter box by the front door. They were all strangers to him, those people—he did not belong up there, in the light and music and ease, any more than he did in the dismal Tracy house below. He walked away heavy with that sense of inexorable solitude which sometimes oppresses young hearts. From all the glorious worlds he could imagine he seemed equally shut out… .