“Good-bye, Mrs. Murchison; good-bye, old man; wish you could have stayed with us. Shake hands, sonny, now you’re off.”

A barrow-load of belated luggage went clattering by as the shrill pipe of the guard’s whistle sounded the departure. On the opposite platform a couple of porters were banging empty milk-cans on to a truck. Yet from the noise and turmoil of it all, John Tugler’s red face shone out with a redeeming exuberance of good-will.

“Good-bye.”

Murchison was leaning from the window, and the two men shook hands.

“Good luck to you.”

“Thanks. You have been very good to us. We shall not forget it.”

“Bosh, man, bosh!” and John Tugler gave Catherine a final flourish of his hat.

The train was on the move, but Murchison still leaned from the window, to the exclusion of his excited and irrepressible son. We grow fond of people who have stood by us in trouble, and John Tugler, bumptious and money-making mortal that he was, carried many generous impulses under his gorgeous waistcoat. The gift of sympathy covers a multitude of imperfections, for the heart craves bread and wine from others, and not the philosopher’s stone.

Interminable barriers of brick, back yards, sour, rubbish-ridden gardens were gliding by. Factories with their tall chimneys, the minarets of labor, stood out above the crowded grayness of the monotonous streets. Hardly a tree, and not an acre of green grass, in Wilton. It was as though nature had cursed the place, and left it no symbol of the season, no passing pageantry of summer, autumn, or of spring.

Catherine had kept Jack by her side, and the boy was kneeling on the seat and looking out of the window. She felt that her husband was in no mood for the child’s chattering. In leaving Wilton he was leaving a poignant part of reality behind, to enter upon a life that should try the strength of his manhood as a bowman tries a bow.

An old lady and a consumptive clerk were their only fellow-travellers. Murchison had chosen a corner whose window looked towards the west, and an intense and determined face it was that stared out over the ugliness of Wilton town. Houses had given place to market-gardens, acres of cabbages, flat, dismal, and dotted with zinc-roofed sheds. Beyond came the slow, sad heave of the Wilton hills, and, seen dimly—white specks upon the hill-side—the crowded head-stones where the dead slept.

The eyes of husband and wife met for a moment. They smiled at each other with the wistful cheerfulness of two people who have determined to be brave, a pathetic pretence hardly created to deceive. Moroseness need not testify deep feeling. The gleam from between the clouds turns even the wet clouds to gold.

Jack Murchison was watching a couple of colts cantering across a field beside the line.

“Mother, look at the old horses.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Silly old things. They’re making that old cow run. The brown one’s like Wellington, the horse we had before dad bought the car.”

“So it is, dear.”

“P’r’aps it is Wellington?”

“No, dear, Wellington must be dead by now.”

The old lady in the opposing corner was looking at Jack over her spectacles, and the boy took to returning the stare with the inimitable composure of youth. Catherine had turned again towards the other window, but the white head-stones no longer checkered the hill-side. Instead, she saw her husband’s profile, stern and determined, yet infinitely sad.

Life has been described as a series of sensations; and though some days are dull and passionless, others vibrate with a thousand waves of feeling. To Murchison the day had been crowded with sensation since the break of dawn. It was a day of disruption, a plucking up of routine from the soil, a change of attitude that concerned the soul even more than the body. He yearned towards Wilton, and yet fled from it with gratitude; his old home called to him, and yet he dreaded it as a disgraced man might fear the shocked faces of familiar friends. It was a day of unrest, self-judgment, and great forethought for him. The physical atoms seemed to tremble and vibrate, till the manhood in him might have been likened to a tremulous vapor. He could eat nothing, fix his mind on nothing. Even the sagging wires, coming and going as the train swept from pole to pole, were not unsymbolical of his thoughts.

Two hundred miles, with an hour’s wait in London, and the monotonous Midlands gave place to the more mysterious and dreamy south. Pine-crowned hills, great oaks and beeches purpling the villages, the blue distance of a more magical horizon. In orchards and meadows the infinite glamour of a golden spring. Quiet rivers curling through the mists of green. In many a park the stately spruce built sombre, windless thickets; larches glimmered with Scotch firs red-throated towards the west. Trees in whispering and triumphant multitudes. Quiet, dreamy meadows where the willows waved. Mysterious Isles of Avalon imaginable towards the setting sun.

Murchison, leaning back in his corner, watched for the pine woods about Roxton town with a deep commingling of yearning and of dread. It was to be a home-coming, and yet what a home-coming! The return of a prodigal, but no cringing prodigal; the return of a man, stiff-necked and square-jawed, ready to fight but not to conciliate. There was something of the tense expectancy of the hour before the bugles blow the assault. Every nerve in Murchison’s body tingled.

The boy Jack was jumping from foot to foot at the other window.

“Look, mother, look, there’s old Mr. Tomkin’s farm! And there’s the river. Look—and the kingcups are out! Gwen used to call ’em—”

He stopped suddenly, for his mother had drawn him to her and smothered the words with her mouth.

“You take care of the rugs and umbrellas, dear.”

“Yes. Shall I get ’em down?”

“In a minute. Sit still, dear, and don’t worry.”

She looked across quickly at her husband. Their eyes met. He was pale, but he smiled at her.

“Here we are, at last.”

“At last.”

Both felt that the ordeal had begun.

They let the boy lean out of the open window as the train ran in and slowed up beside the platform. Porteus Carmagee and his sister were waiting by the door of the booking-office. Jack sighted them and waved a salute, their coach running far beyond the office, for they were in the forepart of the train.

Murchison was the first out of the carriage. He lifted the boy down, and stood waiting to help his wife with some of her parcels.

“Luggage, sir?”

Murchison turned, and stared straight into the face of one of his old patients. The man looked at him blankly for a moment before recognition dawned upon his face.

“Good-day, doctor. Didn’t know you, sir, at first,” and he touched his cap.

Murchison’s upper lip was stiff. He looked like one who had come to judge rather than to be judged.

“Get my luggage out, Johnson. Three trunks, a Gladstone, hat-box, and two wooden cases.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man was polite, though ready to be inquisitive.

“Glad to see you again in Roxton, sir.”

“Thanks.”

“Cab, sir? There’s Timmins’s fly.”

“Yes, that will do.”

Murchison turned abruptly from the porter to find Miss Carmagee and Catherine kissing, and Jack tugging at his godfather’s hands. It was Porteus in a new Panama hat, whose whiteness made his face look brown as an Asiatic’s.

“Ah, my dear Murchison, ten minutes late; beast of a line this.”

“It was good of you to come.&rd............