It was early in April, an insidiously warm morning with the ailanthus trees in bud before the State House, when Jasper Penny left the court room where Essie had been freed.  Provision had been made for her—­she had had a severe collapse during the trial—­and a feeling almost of renewed liberty of spirit permeated Jasper, as, with his overcoat on an arm, he turned to the left and walked over the street in the blandly expanding mildness.  A train left shortly for Jaffa, and he was bound directly home, to Myrtle Forge, anxious to steep himself in the echo of the trip hammer mingled with the poignant harmony of spring sounds drifting from the farm and woods.  He was possessed by a sharpened hunger for all the—­now recognized—­beauty of the place of his allegiance and birth, the serenity of the acres Gilbert Penny had beaten out of the wild of the Province.  He was astonishingly conscious of himself as a part of the whole Penny succession, proud of Gilbert, of Howat, who had always so engaged his fancy, of Casimir, and Daniel, his own father.  Theirs was a good heritage; their part of the earth, the ring of their iron, his particular characteristic of a black Penny, formed a really splendid entity.

The low, horizontal branches of the beech tree on the lawn, older than the dwelling, opposed a pleasant variety on the long facade, built of stone with an appearance of dark pinkish malleability masking its obduracy.  His mother was awaiting him on the narrow portico, and he at once told her of Essie’s release.  They stood together, gazing out across the turf, faintly emerald, over the public road, at the grey, solid group of farm buildings beyond.  The farmer’s daughter, in a white slip, emerged against the barnyard, and called the chickens in a high, musical note, scattering grain to a hysterical feathery mob.  The air was still with approaching twilight; the sun slipped below the western trees and shadows gathered under the lilac bushes; the sky was April green.

“Your father has been dead twelve years,” Gilda Penny said unexpectedly.  He looked down and saw that she was decrepit, an old woman.  Her mouth had sunken, her ears projected in dry folds from her scant strands of hair.  He recalled Daniel Barnes Penny; the earliest memories of his mother, a vigorous, brown-faced woman with alert, black eyes, quick-stepping, dictatorial in the sphere of her house and dependents.  One after the other, like the sun, they were slipping out of the sight of Myrtle Forge; vanished and remained; passed from falling hand to hand the unextinguished flame of life.  Gilda Penny was merging fast into the formless dark.  She clung with pathetically tense fingers to his arm as they turned into the house.