e. And its master, looking at it for the first
time, loved it.

He rode around to the side and tied his mount to an old horse-rack, and
then walked up the wide front steps as if each lift were an event. He
turned the handle of the big door without much hope that it would yield,
but it opened willingly, and he stood inside. A broom lay in a corner,
windows were open--his cousin had been making ready for him. There was
the huge mahogany sofa, horse-hair-covered, in the window under the
stairs, where his mother had read "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." Philip
stepped softly across the wide hall and laid his head where must have
rested the brown hair of the little girl who had come to be, first all
of his life, and then its dearest memory. Half an hour he spent in the
old house, and its walls echoed to his footsteps as if in ready homage,
and each empty room whose door he opened met him with a sweet half
familiarity. The whole place was filled with the presence of the child
who had loved it and left it, and for whom this tall man, her child,
longed now as if for a little sister who should be here, and whom he
missed. With her memory came the thought of the five-year-old uncle who
had made history for the family so disastrously. He must see the garden
where that other Philip had gone with his father to hide the money on
the fated Christmas morning. He closed the house door behind him
carefully, as if he would not disturb a little girl reading in the
window, a little boy sleeping perhaps in the nursery above. Then he
walked down the broad sweep of the driveway, the gravel crunching under
the grass, and across what had been a bit of velvet lawn, and stood for
a moment with his hand on a broken vase, weed-filled, which capped the
stone post of a gateway.

All the garden was misty with memories. Where a tall golden flower
nodded alone, from out of the tangled thicket of an old flower-bed, a
bright-haired child might have laughed with just that air of startled,
gay naughtiness, from the forbidden centre of the blossoms. In the
moulded tan-bark of the path was a vague print, like the ghost of a
footprint that had passed down the way a lifetime ago. The box, half
dead, half sprouted into high unkept growth, still stood stiffly against
the riotous overflow of weeds as if it yet held loyally to its business
of guarding the borders, Philip shifted his gaze slowly, lingering over
the dim contours, the shadowy shape of what the garden had