prevented me?  Was it not better to walk up the long road from the station at twilight, pass silently through the quiet, familiar streets, and then, as I approached the gate of the parsonage, discover a form waiting there as if expecting some one, but whom it was hard to say?  Drawing nearer, I would recognize the form, slender and graceful, and then the face, placid and pale, with the soft hair drawn smoothly over the temples and the thin hands folded in peace.  Oh yes, it was much better thus.

At the last change of trains, ten miles from Heartsease, a heavy summer shower was drenching the town; the very rain was hot, and the earth steamed lustily.  I feared, my plan was spoiled, my meeting at the gate after long years of patient and hopeful waiting.  But the rain passed over, and I was again under way.  Now every inch of the land was familiar:  I recognized old houses and barns and strips of fence and streams that had not been in my mind once in all these years.  I knew every block of forest that had been left on the border of the upland fields, and all the meadows, marshy or dry:  the very faces of the people seemed to recall some one I had known before.  The hills were like lessons learned by heart; and now I came upon the actual haunts of my school-boy days—­the wood where we gave our picnics; the red house, a little out of the village, where one of the boys lived—­strangely enough, the house I remembered, but the boy’s looks and name had gone from me—­and then the train stopped.  I felt a tingling sensation, as if the blood were coming to the surface all over me.

A switchman, and a stranger, waved us welcome with a yard of flaming bunting.  I hurried out of the car and alighted within half a mile of Heartsease.  On the platform, where I had parted with my schoolmates fifteen years before, I waited till the train had passed onward and out of sight.  I was alone:  the switchman asked no odds of me, but furled his bunting and immediately withdrew.  For a moment I looked about me in bewilderment.  I think I could have turned back had I been encouraged to do so, for I felt half guilty in thus surprising my friends.  A moment later I plucked up heart and struck into the road that leads up to the village.

The road has a margin of grass and weeds, and there are meadows on both sides.  I walked in the very middle of it, with my portmanteau in my hand, and looked straight ahead.  Before me lay the village, a cluster of white houses embowered in trees.  It was sunset; the rain had washed the leaves and laid the dust in the road; the air was exquisitely fragrant and of uncommon softness; the white spire of the village church, flanked by a long line of poplars, was gilded with a sunbeam, but the lowly roofs of the villagers were bathed in the radiant twilight that had deepened under the western hills.  Cattle were lowing in the meadows; the crickets chirped everywhere; a barbed swallow clove the air like an arrow whose force is nigh spent; and a child’s voice rang out on the edge of the village as clear as a clarion.  I paused and laughed aloud.  I was mad with joy; an exquisite thrill ran through me; it seemed to me that the most delicious moment of my life had come.