A Candle in the Wind by Mary Imlay Taylor

IT was dark by this time, and Overton consulted his watch, to be sure that it was not too near the judge's dinner-hour for his errand. He was astonished to find that it was almost half-past eight. He had not felt the need of food. He dismissed it entirely from his calculations, and tramped steadily on in the moonlit mist. Through it he could see the lights twinkling in distant houses, while the trees loomed up in feathery, indistinct outlines, downy with foliage. Something in the effect -- the weird brightness of the white sky and the elusive lights -- reminded him of the mirage that had so often mocked him in his polar quest. He recalled it with a keen recollection of Faunce's receding figure, and he thought grimly of the task that lay before him -- the task of persuading Judge Herford to spare his own son-in-law for his daughter's sake.

But the thought uppermost in Overton's mind, as he opened the old gate that had stood for so much in his life, was the prospect of seeing Diane again. No matter how she regarded his return, even if she felt that it was his hand that had destroyed her house of cards, his heart leaped up with hope. The insistent demand for personal happiness is not only a primal instinct of human nature, and as much a constituent part of it as the flowers and birds and bees are evidences of springtime and summer, but it is also the hardest aspiration to kill, surviving blows that would destroy the strongest impulse of endeavor or ambition.