As before, he rode out from the Phoenix Hotel, and at ten o’clock in the morning he turned into Fairfield.  It was a still, bright Christmas morning, crisp and cool, and the air like wine.  The house stood bravely in the sunlight, but the branches above it were bare and no softening leafage hid the marks of time; it looked old and sad and deserted to-day, and its master gazed at it with a pang in his heart.  It was his, and he could not save it.  He turned away and walked slowly to the garden, and stood a moment as he had stood last May, with his hand on the stone gateway.  It was very silent and lonely here, in the hush of winter; nothing stirred; even the shadows of the interlaced branches above lay almost motionless across the walks.

Something moved to his left, down the pathway—­he turned to look.  Had his heart stopped, that he felt this strange, cold feeling in his breast?  Were his eyes—­could he be seeing?  Was this insanity?  Fifty feet down the path, half in the weaving shadows, half in clear sunlight, stood the little boy of his life-long vision, in the dress with the black velvet squares, his little uncle, dead forty years ago.  As he gazed, his breath stopping, the child smiled and held up to him, as of old, a key on a scarlet string, and turned and flitted as if a flower had taken wing, away between the box hedges.  Philip, his feet moving as if without his will, followed him.  Again the baby face turned its smiling dark eyes toward him, and Philip knew that the child was calling him, though there was no sound; and again without volition of his own his feet took him where it led.  He felt his breath coming difficultly, and suddenly a gasp shook him—­there was no footprint on the unfrozen earth where the vision had passed.  Yet there before him, moving through the deep sunlit silence of the garden, was the familiar, sturdy little form in its old-world dress.  Philip’s eyes were open; he was awake, walking; he saw it.  Across the neglected tangle it glided, and into the trim order of Shelby’s rose garden; in the opening between the box walls it wheeled again, and the sun shone clear on the bronze hair and fresh face, and the scarlet string flashed and the key glinted at the end of it.  Philip’s fascinated eyes saw all of that.  Then the apparition slipped into the shadow of the beech trees and Philip quickened his step breathlessly, for it seemed that life and death hung on the sight.  In and out through the trees it moved; once more the face turned toward him; he caught the quick brightness of a smile.  The little chap had disappeared behind the broad tree-trunk, and Philip, catching his breath, hurried to see him appear again.  He was gone.  The little spirit that had strayed from over the border of a world—­who can say how far, how near?—­unafraid in this earth-corner once its home, had slipped away into eternity through the white gate of ghosts and dreams.