The limestone pike was the same, and the creek was still rushing noisily over the stones in its bed, as Tom remarked gratefully.  But the heaviest of the buffets came when the barrier hills were passed and the surrey horses made no motion to turn in at the gate of the old oak-shingled house beyond the iron-works.

“Hold on!” said Tom.  “Doesn’t the driver know where we live?”

The old-time, gentle smile wrinkled about the iron-master’s eyes.

“That’s the sup’rintendent’s office and lab’ratory now, son.  It was getting to be tolerable noisy down here for your mammy, so nigh to the plant.  And we allowed to s’prise you.  We’ve been buildin’ us a new house up on the knoll just this side o’ Major Dabney’s.”

It was the cruelest of the changes—­the one hardest to bear; and it drove the boy back into the dumb reticence which was a part of his birthright.  Had they left him nothing by which to remember the old days—­days which were already beginning to take on the glamour of unutterable happiness past?

Nevertheless, he could not help looking curiously for the new home—­the old being irretrievably sacked and ruined; but there were more shocks to come between.  One of Mr. Duxbury Farley’s side issues had been a real estate boom for Paradise Valley proper.  South Tredegar being prosperous, the time had seemed propitious for the engrafting of the country-house idea.  By some means, marvelous to those who knew Major Dabney’s tenacious land-grip, the promoter had bought in the wooded hillsides facing the mountain, cut them into ten-acre residence plots, run a graveled drive on the western side of the creek to front them, and presto! the thing was done.

Tom saw well-kept lawns, park-like groves and pretentious country villas where he had once trailed Nance Jane through the “dark woods,” and his father told him the names and circumstance of the owners as they drove up the pike.  There was Rockwood, the summer home of the Stanleys, and The Dell, owned, and inhabited at intervals, by Mr. Young-Dickson, of the South Tredegar potteries.  Farther along there was Fairmount, whose owner was a wealthy cotton-seed buyer; Rook Hill, which Tom remembered as the ancient roosting ground of the migratory winter crows; and Farnsworth Park, ruralizing the name of its builder.  On the most commanding of the hillsides was a pile of rough-cut Tennessee marble with turrets and many gables, rejoicing in the classic name of Warwick Lodge.  This, Tom was told, was the country home of Mr. Farley himself, and the house alone had cost a fortune.

At the turn in the pike where you lost sight finally of the iron-works, there was a new church, a miniature in native stone of good old Stephen Hawker’s church of Morwenstow.  Tom gasped at the sight of it, and scowled when he saw the gilded cross on the tower.

“Catholic!” he said.  “And right here in our valley!”

“No,” said the father; “it’s ‘Piscopalian.  Colonel Farley is one o’ the vestries, or whatever you call ’em, of St. Michael’s yonder in town.  I reckon he wanted to get his own kind o’ people round him out here, so he built this church, and they run it as a sort of side-show to the big church.  Your mammy always looks the other way when we come by.”