to the dull color of old wood.
One glance told him it was no longer a dwelling. The shutters that remained were closed tight, and from the tangled vines arose, as a single chord, a rich shrill sound of a hundred birds. John Jackson left the road and stalked across the yard knee-deep in abandoned grass. When he came near, something choked up his throat. He paused and sat down on a stone in a patch of welcome shade.
This was his own house, as no other house would ever be; within these plain walls he had been incomparably happy. Here he had known and learned that kindness which he had carried into life. Here he had found the secret of those few simple decencies, so often invoked, so inimitable and so rare, which in the turmoil of competitive industry had made him to coarser men a source of half-scoffing, half-admiring surprise. This was his house, because his honor had been born and nourished here; he had known every hardship of the country poor, but no preventable regret.
And yet another memory, a memory more haunting than any other, and grown strong at this crisis in his life, had really drawn him back. In this yard, on this battered porch, in the very tree over his head, he seemed still to catch the glint of yellow hair and the glow of bright childish eyes that had belonged to his first love, the girl who had lived in the long-vanished house across the way. It was her ghost who was most alive here, after all.
He got up suddenly, stumbling through the shrubbery, and followed an almost obliterated path to the house, starting at the whirring sound of a blackbird which rose out of the grass close by. The front porch sagged dangerously at his step as he pushed open the door. There was no sound inside, except the steady slow throb of silence; but as he stepped in a word came to him, involuntary as his breath, and he uttered it aloud, as if he were calling to someone in the empty house.
“Alice,” he cried; and then louder, “Alice!”
From a room at the left came a short, small, frightened cry. Startled, John Jackson paused in the door, convinced that his own imagination had evoked the reality of the cry.
“Alice!” he called doubtfully.
“Who’s there?”
There was no mistake this time. The voice, frightened, strange, and yet familiar, came from what had once been the parlor, and as he listened John Jackson was aware of a nervous step within. Trembling a little, he pushed open the parlor door.
A woman with alarmed bright eyes and reddish-gold hair was standing in the center of the bare room. She was of that age that trembles between the enduring youth of a fine, unworried life and the imperative call of forty years, and there was that indefinable loveliness in her face that youth gives sometimes just before it leaves a dwelling it has possessed for long. Her figure, just outside of slenderness, leaned with dignified grace against the old mantel on which her white hand rested, and through a rift in the shutter a shaft of late sunshine fell through upon her gleaming hair.
When John Jackson came in the doorway her large grey eyes closed and then opened again, and she gave another little cry. Then a curious thing happened; they stared at each other for a moment without a word, her hand dropped from the mantel and she took a swaying step toward him. And, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, John Jackson came forward, too, and took her into his arms and kissed her as if she were a little child.
“Alice!” he said huskily.
She drew a long breath and pushed herself away from him.
“I’ve come back here,” he muttered unsteadily, “and find you waiting in this room where we used to sit, just as if I’d never been away.”
“I only dropped in for a minute,” she said, as if that was the most important thing in the world. “And now, naturally, I’m going to cry.”
“Don’t cry.”
“I’ve got to cry. You don’t think”—she smiled through wet eyes—“you don’t think that things like this hap—happen to a person every day.”
John Jackson walked in wild excitement to the window and threw it open to the afternoon.
“What were you doing here?” he cried, turning around. “Did you just come by accident today?”
“I come every week. I bring the children sometimes, but usually I come alone.”
“The children!” he exclaimed. “Have you got children?”
She nodded.
“I’ve been married for years and years.”
They stood there looking at each other for a moment; then they both laughed and glanced away.
“I kissed you,” she said.
“Are you sorry?”
She shook her head.
“And the last time I kissed you was down by that gate ten thousand years ago.”
He took her hand, and they went out and sat side by side on the broken stoop. The sun was painting the west with sweeping bands of peach bloom and pigeon blood and golden yellow.
“You’re married,” she said. “I saw in the paper—years ago.”
He nodded.
“Yes, I’ve been married,” he answered gravely. “My wife went away with someone she cared for many years ago.”
“Ah, I’m sorry.” And after another long silence—“It’s a gorgeous evening, John Jackson.”
“It’s a long time since I’ve been so happy.”
There was so much to say and to tell that neither of them tried to talk, but only sat there holding hands, like two children who had wandered for a long time through a wood and now came upon each other with unimaginable happiness in an accidental glade. Her husband was poor, she said; he knew that from the worn, unfashionable dress which she wore with such an air. He was George Harland—he kept a garage in the village.
“George Harland—a red-headed boy?” he asked wonderingly.
She nodded.
“We were engaged for years. Sometimes I thought we’d never marry. Twice I postponed it, but it was getting late to just be a girl—I was twenty-five, and so finally we did. After that I was in love with him for over a year.”
When the sunset fell together in a jumbled heap of color in the bottom of the sky, they strolled back along the quiet road, still hand in hand.
“Will you come to dinner? I want you to see the children. My oldest boy is just fifteen.”
She lived in a plain frame house two doors from the garage, where two little girls were playing around a battered and ancient but occupied baby carriage in the yard.
“Mother! Oh Mother!” they cried.
Small brown arms swirled around her neck as she knelt beside them on the walk.
“Sister says Anna didn’t come, so we can’t have any dinner.”
“Mother’ll cook dinner. What’s the matter with Anna?”
“Anna’s
