Maurice was half aware that his was a character sure to be influenced
greatly by affection; but he felt that it would never again be possible
for him so to give up to another the guidance of his life as he now saw
that he had yielded it to his friend. He had learned his weakness, and
the lesson had been enforced too sharply ever to be forgotten.
He was coming now into the region of his old home. The forests were
beginning faintly to show the approach of spring; the treetops were
dimly warming in color, the branches thickening against the sky. Here
and there Maurice looked down on a brook black with the late rains and
with the floods from the snow-drifts still melting on the distant
hills. Now he caught a far flash of the river where he had skated in
winters almost forgotten, so fast does time move, where he had fished
and bathed in summers so long gone that they seemed to belong to the
life of some other. Yet once more and a distant hill, duskily blue
against the bluer heavens, wakened for him some memory of his boyhood,
seeming to challenge him to renew the old joys and to revel in the by-
gone fervors.
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