before, and which should
now have been weeded, trimmed, and hoed, were growing with an untended
recklessness that had all the proverbial resemblance to moral breakdown.
In the cucumber-house the vines had become rusty and limp, sagging from
the twines on which they climbed in debauched indifference to
sightliness. The roof of the hothouse that had contained the flowers had
a deep gash in the glass which it was no longer worth while to mend.
There was no yellow-brown plume from the furnace chimney, and the very
windows of the old house with the mansard roof had in their stare the
glazed, unseeing expression of eyes in which there is death. Inside,
Mrs. Fay was packing up. Battered old trunks that had long been stored
in some moldy hiding-place stood agape; a packing-case held the place of
honor in a forbidding "best room" into which Lois had never looked
before. Mrs. Fay had little to say. Tears welled into her cold eyes with
the attempt to say anything. Outside, Fay himself had nothing to say at
all. Lois had accosted him, and though he had ceased to regard her as an
enemy, he stood grimly silent as his only response to her words of
consolation.

"I know things will come all right again, Mr. Fay. They must. They look
dark now; but haven't you often noticed that after the worst times in
our lives we're able to look back and see that the very thing that
seemed most cruel was the turning-point at which a change for the better
began? You must surely have noticed that--a man with so much experience
as you."

He looked vaguely about him, standing in patience till she had said her
say, but giving no indication that her words had anything to do with
him. The change in his appearance shocked her. Everything in his face
had taken on what was to her a terrible significance. The starry
mysticism had vanished from the eyes to be replaced by a look that was
at once hunted and searching, vindictive and yet woebegone. The mouth
was sunken as the mouths of old men become from the loss of teeth, and
the thin lips which used to be kindly and vacillating were drawn with a
hard, unflinching tightness. The skin that had long been gray was now
ghostly, with the shadowy, not quite earthly, hue of things about to
disappear.

She had talked to him for some minutes before he woke to animation. At
sight of two young men--surveyor's clerks, perhaps--who had set up in
the roadway what might have been a camera on a tripod, or more probably
a theo