It was too late now. The years had made their record, the books were closed, and the boy was as he was.

For the most part he was content to drift, and if he had been so ill taught as not to know that drifting always led down-stream, who shall be blamed?

It is difficult to explain why a young man so exceptionally brilliant as Wayne Pierson certainly was, and with such excellent mental training as he had undoubtedly enjoyed, should order all his movements by the law of impulse, except on the basis that the one foolish mistake of his life had taken such hold upon him that it held his common sense in chains, and left him to be the creature of the moment.

"There's more than one kind of wilderness," she said. "That boy of mine has been floundering through some of them for years. There is one verse in the Bible that if I've thought of once I suppose I have a hundred times in the last few weeks: 'And though shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee, these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldst keep his commandments or not.'