The clover-blossom perfumed the summer air.  The scythe and the sickle still hung in the barn.  Grass and grain swayed and whispered and sparkled in the sun and wind.  June loitered upon all the gentle hills, and peaceful meadows, and winding brook sides.  June breathed in the sweet-brier that climbed the solid stone posts of the gate-way, and clustered along the homely country stone wall.  June blossomed in the yellow barberry by the road-side, and in the bright rhodora and the pale orchis in the dark woods.  June sang in the whistle of the robin swinging on the elm and the cherry, and the gushing warble of the bobolink tumbling, and darting, and fluttering in the warm meadow.  June twinkled in the keen brightness of the fresh green of leaves, and swelled in the fruit buds.  June clucked and crowed in the cocks and hens that stepped about the yard, followed by the multitudinous peep of little chickens.  June lowed in the cattle in the pasture.  June sprang, and sprouted, and sang, and grew in all the sprouting and blooming, in all the sunny new life of the world.

White among the dark pine-trees stood the old house of Pinewood—­a temple of silence in the midst of the teeming, overpowering murmur of new life; of silence and darkness in the midst of jubilant sunshine and universal song, that seemed to press against the very windows over which the green blinds were drawn.

But that long wave of rich life, as it glided across the lawn and in among the solemn pine-trees, was a little hushed and subdued.  The birds sang in the trees beyond—­the bobolinks gushed in the meadows below.  But there was a little space of silence about the house.

In the large drawing-room, draped in cool-colored chintz, where once Gabriel Bennet and Abel Newt had seen Hope Wayne, on the table where books had lain like porcelain ornaments, lay a strange piece of furniture, long, and spreading at one end, smelling of new varnish, studded with high silver-headed nails, and with a lid.  It was lined with satin.  Yes, it was a casket.

The room was more formal, and chilly, and dim than ever.  Puffs of air crept through it as if frightened—­frightened to death before they got out again.  The smell of the varnish was stronger than that of the clover-blossoms, or the roses or honey-suckles outside in the fields and gardens, and about the piazzas.

Upon the wall hung the portrait of Christopher Burt at the age of ten, standing in clean clothes, holding a hoop in one hand and a book in the other.  It was sixty-four years before that the portrait was painted, and if one had come searching for that boy he would have found him—­by lifting that lid he would have seen him; but in those sunken features, that white hair, that startling stillness of repose, would he have recognized the boy of the soft eyes and the tender heart, whose June clover had not yet blossomed?