ents put imposts upon, and men list in tax returns and carry
to steel vaults to hoard away, Sarah Newbolt had her dreams. She had no
golden past; there was no golden future ready before her feet. There was
no review for her in those visions of happy days and tender memories,
over which a woman half closes her eyes and smiles, or over the incense
of which a man's heart softens. Behind her stretched a wake of
turbulence and strife; ahead of her lay the banked clouds of an
unsettled and insecure future.

But she had her dreams, in which even the poorest of us may indulge when
our taskmaster in the great brickworks of this hot and heavy world is
not hard by and pressing us forward with his lash. She had her dreams of
what never was and never could be; of old longings, old heart-hungers,
old hopes, and loves which never had come near for one moment's caress
of her toil-hardened hand. Dreams which roved the world and soothed the
ache in her heart by their very extravagance, which even her frugal
conscience could not chide; dreams which drew hot tears upon her cheeks,
to trickle down among her knotted fingers and tincture the bitterness of
things unrealized.

The crunch of wheels in the road now startled her from her profitless
excursions among the mist of visions and dreams. She lifted her head
like a cow startled from her peaceful grazing, for the vehicle had
stopped at the gap in the fence where the gate should have stood warder
between its leaning posts.

"Well, he's come," said she with the resignation of one who finds the
long expected and dreaded at hand.

A man got out of the buggy and hitched his horse to one of the old
gate-posts, first trying it to satisfy himself that it was trustworthy,
for stability in even a post on those premises, where everything was
going to decay, seemed unreasonable to expect. He turned up the path,
bordered by blue flags, thrusting their swordpoints through the ground,
and strode toward the house, with that uncouth giving at the knees which
marks a man who long has followed the plow across furrowed fields.

The visitor was tall and bony, brown, dry-faced, and frowning of aspect.
There was severity in every line of his long, loose body; in the hard
wrinkles of his forehead, in his ill-nurtured gray beard, which was so
harsh that it rasped like wire upon his coat as he turned his head in
quick appraisement of his surroundings. His feet were bunion-distorted
and lumpy in his great coarse