From that day on matters moved rapidly. Lilla managed to make him think he was really in love with her. He wondered if perhaps after all the sun was going to shine again for him; and he put the past under lock and key and began to smile again.

He and Lilla were married soon and set up a house in New York, but almost from the start he began to be undeceived. The evenings of reading together suddenly began to openly bore her. Lilla had no notion of settling down to a domestic life. Her husband was only one of many on whom she lavished her smiles, and as soon as she had him safely she began to show her true nature: selfish, untrue, disloyal, mercenary, ambitious.

The revelation did not come all at once. Even after their child was born he still had hope of winning her to a simpler, more practical manner of life. But he found that the child was, in her eyes, only a hindrance to her ambitions and that he was not even that; and when Lilla filled his house with men and women of another world than his, whose tastes and ways were utterly distasteful to him, he began to absent himself more and more from home. This had been made possible by the growing demand for his services as lecturer and adviser in the world of science. So it came about that whenever he received an invitation of this sort he accepted it, until sometimes he would be away lecturing in universities for weeks at a time, or touring the West.

Little Athalie had never meant anything to him but a reproach. Somehow her round, blank stare had always sent his thoughts back to the first little one whom he had given away; and he felt a reproach in spite of the fact that he always reasoned it out within himself that he had done well in so doing.

So, at war with himself, he had grown more and more morose, living to himself whenever he was at home, scarcely ever even a figurehead in his own house at the functions that his wife delighted to give to her own frivolous set. As he grew to understand the true character of his second wife, his mind reverted to his old bitterness against a God—if there was a God—who had thrust this hard fate upon him.

So, bitterly and haughtily, he had lifted his proud head and taken the blows of life without comfort. And now he had come home.

He had arrived in the late afternoon and found the town of Silver Sands much as he left it years ago. There was a new thrifty little stucco station in place of the grimy one of clapboards of the old days, but the old barns and blacksmith shop were there just as he left them, a trifle more weather-beaten and dilapidated but doing a thriving business in automobile tires and truck repairs.

The old stone church where as a child he went to Sunday school and sat beside Aunt Lavinia in the dim pew afterward, with Uncle Standish next to the aisle, and squirmed or slept through a long service, looked just the same, except that the ivy on the tower grew thicker and higher. The graveyard sloping down the hill behind, the Baptist church across the corner—redbrick with aspen trees in front and chalk marks where the children played hopscotch during the week on the brick walk up to the steps—were unchanged. A little farther on he could see the redbrick schoolhouse where he went to school glimmering through the trees, and the old bare playground where he used to play baseball. Here he had somehow bluffed his way into high school and finally prepared for college. He had heard rumors of a new high school up in the new part of town, but the old part where he had lived his young life seemed almost unchanged.

He had gone into the old house expecting to find the chill of the long-closed place about it, but the door had swung open, and the old servant, Joe Quinn, with his wife Molly, the cook, had stood smiling at the end of the hall a little wrinkled and gray, rounder as to form, more bent; and there in the parlor door quite ceremoniously had stood Anne Truesdale, an Englishwoman whom his aunt Lavinia had befriended when her husband died and who had been housekeeper since his aunt’s death. Her hair was white, and she had lost her rosy cheeks, but her eyes were bright and her thin form as erect as ever in its black silk and thin white cuffs and collar. She put out a ceremonious hand to welcome the boy she used to chide, with a deference to his years and station that showed her reverence for him.

“Well, Master Pat,” she said, using the old name he had not heard for years. “So yer come again. Welcome home! It’s right glad we are to see ye!”

For the moment it almost seemed as if he were a boy again, coming home for vacation.

He went up to his room and found it unchanged with the years. He spent a happy moment glancing over the old pictures of high school teams that were framed on his walls. Then he came down to the dining room and sat at the wide table alone eating a supper as similar to those of his childhood as the same cook could make it: stewed chicken with little biscuits, currant jelly from the bushes in the garden, prune jam and cherry delight from the trees he had helped to plant, mashed potatoes as smooth as cream, peas that were incredibly sweet, little white onions smothered in cream, cherry pie that would melt in your mouth for flakiness, and coffee like ambrosia.

Shades of the starving Russians! Was he dreaming? Where was Siberia? Had the war ever been? Was he perhaps a boy again?

But no! Those empty places across the table! That ivy-covered church down the street surrounded by its white gravestones showing in the dusk! A world of horror in France between! Other gravestones, too, and an empty sinful world! Ah! No, he was not a boy again!

He opened the door of the dear old library half expecting to see the kindly face of his Uncle Standish sitting at the desk, and instead there was the letter!

He had come home for rest and peace, and this had met him! He seemed to hear Lilla’s mocking laugh ringing clearly through the distant halls as if her spirit had lingered to watch over her letter and enjoy its reception. It was like Lilla to prepare the setting of a musical comedy for anything she had to do. Why couldn’t she have written to ask him what he wanted her to do about the child?

His anger rose. Lilla should not make a laughingstock of him in any such way. He glanced at the date of the letter and angrily reached for the telephone.

“Give me Western Union!” he demanded sternly, and dictated his telegram crisply:

ON NO ACCOUNT SEND THE CHILD HERE. WILL MAKE IMMEDIATE ARRANGEMENTS FOR HER ELSEWHERE. LETTER FOLLOWS BY FIRST MAIL.