You will be there ?" "Yes, I'll be there," he replied; and then because there was nothing further for him to say, he bowed over his hat, and went down the flagged walk to the orchard, where the bluebirds were still singing.

His misery appeared to him colossal--of a size that overshadowed not only the spring landscape, but life itself.

He tried to remember a time when he was happy, but this was beyond the stretch of his imagination at the moment, and it seemed to him that he had plodded on year after year with a leaden weight oppressing his heart.
"I might have known it would be like this," he was thinking.

"First, I wanted the mill, so I'd lie awake at night about it, and then when I got it all the machinery was worn out.

It's always that way and always will be, I reckon." And it appeared to him that this terrible law of incompleteness lay like a blight over the over the whole field of human endeavour.