s
bared breast, as it were, the fresh air of truth and constancy,--of all
that makes life worth the having.

He drove away,--away over the broad fields and the well-remembered
meadows, out upon the Dummerston road, and over the Ridge Hill. Well,
life was not all behind him!

He took out his watch. It was time to keep his appointment. He left
the horse at the tavern-door, and walked up the road towards the
trysting-place, the old pear-tree. He looked wistfully at it, and sprang
over the wall, with considerable effort, as he could not but admit
to himself. That old pear-tree! They had called it old fifteen years
ago,--and here it stood, as proud and strong as then! The two great
branches that stretched towards the south, and which he had often
thought had something benignant in their aspect, as if they would bless
the wayfarer or the sojourner under their shade, still reached forth
and spread abroad their strong arms. But to-night, whether from his own
excited imagination, or because the early frosts had stripped it of
its leaves and so bereaved it of all that gave grace to its aspect, or
perhaps from the deepening twilight,--however it was, the old tree had a
different expression, and stretched forth two skeleton arms with a sort
of half-warning, half-mocking gesture, that sent a shudder over his
frame, already disturbed by the successive presence, in the last two or
three hours, of more emotions than he could comfortably sustain.

Swan was not an imaginative person. Yet the tree looked to him like
a living, sentient thing, dooming him and warning him. As in the
compression of the brain in drowning, it is said forgotten memories are
hustled uppermost, and the events of early life vividly written on
the consciousness,--so in this unwonted stir of past and present
associations, Swan found himself remembering, with a thrill of pleasure
that was chased by a spasm of pain, the last evening on which he had
parted from Dorcas. He remembered, as if it were but now, how he had
turned towards the pear-tree, when Dorcas had gone out of sight and he
dared not follow her, and that the pear-tree had seemed to hear, to see,
to sympathize with him,--that it had spread out great blessing arms on
the southern air, and had seemed to encourage and strengthen his hopes
of a happy return.

Was the fearful expression it now wore a shadow, a forerunner of what he
might expect? He shook off, with an effort that was less painful than
the suf