However, when she had regained the tarvia road and walked a little way the shadow suddenly passed, and she stood surprised.  The sight of a long common with its ancient trees in the fullness of glory, dense maples, sturdy oaks, strong, graceful elms that cast flickering, lacy shadows across the road filled her with satisfaction, with a sense of peace deepened by the awareness, in the background, ranged along the common on either side, of stately, dignified buildings, each in an appropriate frame of foliage.  With the essence rather than the detail of all this her consciousness became steeped; she was naturally ignorant of the great good fortune of Silliston Academy of having been spared with one or two exceptions—­donations during those artistically lean years of the nineteenth century when American architecture affected the Gothic, the Mansard, and the subsequent hybrid.  She knew this must be Silliston, the seat of that famous academy of which she had heard.

The older school buildings and instructors’ houses, most of them white or creamy yellow, were native Colonial, with tall, graceful chimneys and classic pillars and delicate balustrades, eloquent at once of the racial inheritance of the Republic and of a bygone individuality, dignity, and pride.  And the modern architect, of whose work there was an abundance, had graciously and intuitively held this earlier note and developed it.  He was an American, but an American who had been trained.  The result was harmony, life as it should proceed, the new growing out of the old.  And no greater tribute can be paid to Janet Bumpus than that it pleased her, struck and set exquisitely vibrating within her responsive chords.  For the first time in her adult life she stood in the presence of tradition, of a tradition inherently if unconsciously the innermost reality of her being a tradition that miraculously was not dead, since after all the years it had begun to put forth these vigorous shoots....

What Janet chiefly realized was the delicious, contented sense of having come, visually at least, to the home for which she had longed.  But her humour was that of a child who has strayed, to find its true dwelling place in a region of beauty hitherto unexplored and unexperienced, tinged, therefore, with unreality, with mystery,—­an effect enhanced by the chance stillness and emptiness of the place.  She wandered up and down the Common, whose vivid green was starred with golden dandelions; and then, spying the arched and shady vista of a lane, entered it, bent on new discoveries.  It led past one of the newer buildings, the library—­as she read in a carved inscription over the door—­plunged into shade again presently to emerge at a square farmhouse, ancient and weathered, with a great square chimney thrust out of the very middle of the ridge-pole,—­a landmark left by one of the earliest of Silliston’s settlers.  Presiding over it, embracing and protecting it, was a splendid tree.  The place was evidently