e. I lingered behind
him, detained in part by some delays at the custom-house. I longed to
see my mother, but felt, though with but little of the old jealousy,
that Mr. Floyd had almost the best right to see her first, because,
now-a-days, I was always looking the truth square in the face, and
realizing that it could not be long before cruel and irremediable loss
was to encompass us, and that the rest of our lives we should have not
substance, but shadowy memories only, in place of this dear friend of
ours. So I let him speed on to The Headlands, and dreamed of the
love-flush on the cheeks of the two women who met him there.

I knew comparatively little of my old set of friends, and of late Jack
Holt had almost slipped out of my circle of correspondents. I was aware
that his marriage had been delayed the previous year and the time fixed
for Christmas, but neither Harry nor I had been advised of it, and my
mother had only written that she heard there were fresh delays, and that
the elder Holt had involved his firm in difficulties. I determined,
therefore, to stop at Belfield on my way to The Headlands and see Jack
and all the old friends I might still have remaining there. Of late
years my passing associations had become so diffused with their endless
transitions that every memory of my old home was becoming more and more
fixed and permanent, the nucleus of my recollection distinct and
unchangeable.

I reached Belfield early one morning late in May. The season was perhaps
a little late, for the apple trees were still in bloom, and the village
looked fair and virginal as a bride on her wedding-day. I walked along
the wide pleasant streets with a curious pain. The years that lay
between me and the last day I had paced these broad walks under the pale
greenery of the elms seemed legendary and dreamlike. There was the
schoolhouse on the hill, and the well-worn playground about it. Beyond
lay the woods, half colored now with clear pellucid green, gleams of
silver and shades of scarlet here and there. My mind reverted with
clearness to the little nooks and dingles of the hills and meadows
thereabouts: I remembered a woodland spring boiling up in a hollow of
the greenest grass I ever saw, and in the copse beside it grew the most
beautiful rose-tinted anemones. I could have gone to the foot of a great
oak and found the root of white violets which had been one of my
earliest and dearest secrets; and I wondered--with a longing
i