The horse turned a corner and broke into a canter up the slope, and as the shoulder of the hill fell away there stood before him the picture of his childhood come to life, smiling drowsily in the morning sunlight with shuttered windows that were its sleeping eyes—­the great white house of Fairfield.  Its high pillars reached to the roof; its big wings stretched away at either side; the flicker of the shadow of the leaves played over it tenderly and hid broken bits of woodwork, patches of paint cracked away, window-panes gone here and there.  It stood as if too proud to apologize or to look sad for such small matters, as serene, as stately as in its prime.  And its master, looking at it for the first time, loved it.

He rode around to the side and tied his mount to an old horse-rack, and then walked up the wide front steps as if each lift were an event.  He turned the handle of the big door without much hope that it would yield, but it opened willingly, and he stood inside.  A broom lay in a corner, windows were open—­his cousin had been making ready for him.  There was the huge mahogany sofa, horse-hair-covered, in the window under the stairs, where his mother had read “Ivanhoe” and “The Talisman.”  Philip stepped softly across the wide hall and laid his head where must have rested the brown hair of the little girl who had come to be, first all of his life, and then its dearest memory.  Half an hour he spent in the old house, and its walls echoed to his footsteps as if in ready homage, and each empty room whose door he opened met him with a sweet half familiarity.  The whole place was filled with the presence of the child who had loved it and left it, and for whom this tall man, her child, longed now as if for a little sister who should be here, and whom he missed.  With her memory came the thought of the five-year-old uncle who had made history for the family so disastrously.  He must see the garden where that other Philip had gone with his father to hide the money on the fated Christmas morning.  He closed the house door behind him carefully, as if he would not disturb a little girl reading in the window, a little boy sleeping perhaps in the nursery above.  Then he walked down the broad sweep of the driveway, the gravel crunching under the grass, and across what had been a bit of velvet lawn, and stood for a moment with his hand on a broken vase, weed-filled, which capped the stone post of a gateway.

All the garden was misty with memories.  Where a tall golden flower nodded alone, from out of the tangled thicket of an old flower-bed, a bright-haired child might have laughed with just that air of startled, gay naughtiness, from the forbidden centre of the blossoms.  In the moulded tan-bark of the path was a vague print, like the ghost of a footprint that had passed down the way a lifetime ago.  The box, half dead, half sprouted into high unkept growth, still stood stiffly against the riotous overflow of weeds as if it yet