rom a daughter
of Kentucky--his mother. It was May now, and he remembered she had told
him that the land was filled with roses at the end of May--he would go
then. He owned the old place, Fairfield, and he had never seen it.
Perhaps it had fallen to pieces; perhaps his mother had painted it in
colors too bright; but it was his, the bit of the earth that belonged to
him. The Anglo-Saxon joy of land-owning stirred for the first time
within him--he would go to his own place. Buoyant with the new thought
he sat down and wrote a letter. A cousin of the family, of a younger
branch, a certain John Fairfield, lived yet upon the land. Not in the
great house, for that had been closed many years, but in a small house
almost as old, called Westerly. Philip had corresponded with him once or
twice about affairs of the estate, and each letter of the older man's
had brought a simple and urgent invitation to come South and visit him.
So, pleased as a child with the plan, he wrote that he was coming on a
certain Thursday, late in May. The letter sent, he went about in a dream
of the South, and when its answer, delighted and hospitable, came
simultaneously with one of those bleak and windy turns of weather which
make New York, even in May, a marvellously fitting place to leave, he
could not wait. Almost a week ahead of his time he packed his bag and
took the Southwestern Limited, and on a bright Sunday morning he awoke
in the old Phoenix Hotel in Lexington. He had arrived too late the night
before to make the fifteen miles to Fairfield, but he had looked over
the horses in the livery-stable and chosen the one he wanted, for he
meant to go on horseback, as a Southern gentleman should, to his domain.
That he meant to go alone, that no one, not even John Fairfield, knew of
his coming, was not the least of his satisfactions, for the sight of the
place of his forefathers, so long neglected, was becoming suddenly a
sacred thing to him. The old house and its young owner should meet each
other like sweethearts, with no eyes to watch their greeting, their slow
and sweet acquainting; with no living voices to drown the sound of the
ghostly voices that must greet his home-coming from those walls--voices
of his people who had lived there, voices gone long since into eternal
silence.

A little crowd of loungers stared with frank admiration at the young
fellow who came out smiling from the door of the Phoenix Hotel, big and
handsome in his riding clothe