traveled about, darkness so brooded over him that
the sight of him was a wrong done to other people
because it was as if he poisoned the air about him
with gloom. Most strangers thought he must be
either half mad or a man with some hidden crime
on his soul. He was a tall man with a drawn face
and crooked shoulders and the name he always entered
on hotel registers was, "Archibald Craven,
Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire, England."

He had traveled far and wide since the day he
saw Mistress Mary in his study and told her she
might have her "bit of earth." He had been in
the most beautiful places in Europe, though he had
remained nowhere more than a few days. He had
chosen the quietest and remotest spots. He had
been on the tops of mountains whose heads were
in the clouds and had looked down on other mountains
when the sun rose and touched them with
such light as made it seem as if the world were
just being born.

But the light had never seemed to touch himself
until one day when he realized that for the
first time in ten years a strange thing had happened.
He was in a wonderful valley in the Austrian
Tyrol and he had been walking alone through
such beauty as might have lifted any man's soul
out of shadow. He had walked a long way and
it had not lifted his. But at last he had felt tired

[[356]]

p355 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p356w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p357

v?