When the train left him at Paul’s Landing Vance knew that what had taken him there was not the wish to see the cottage where he had lived with Laura Lou. That past was buried under the dead leaves of too many seasons. What he craved for, with a sort of tremulous convalescent hunger, was a sight of the Willows, the old house where his real life had begun.

It was less than three years since he had come to Paul’s Landing to implore Halo Tarrant to go away with him, instead of waiting to obtain her divorce; but on that feverish day he had not given the Willows a thought, and his last sight of the fantastic old house and the abandoned garden, though not remote in years, seemed to belong to his embryonic stage.

The day was soft, the air full of spring scents and the shimmer of sun through wrinkled leaves. Vance got into the tram which passed by the lane leading to the Willows. The mean outskirts of the town were meaner than ever; new cottages had been built, but the old ones had not been repainted. The suburb, evidently uncertain of its future, awaited in slatternly unconcern the coming of the land~speculator or of the municipal park-designer. But in the lane that climbed to the Willows Vance felt his boy’s heart wake in him. From the ruts underfoot to the elm boughs overhead, nothing around him was changed; and when he reached the gate and gazed across the lawn to the house, its inconsequent turrets and gables showed uncertainly through the same veil of weeping willows.

So completely was he drawn back into the past that he felt in his pocket for the key he used to take from his mother-in-law’s drawer when he stole up the lane to meet Halo Spear — and later to meet Halo Tarrant. The key was not there, but as he leaned on the gate in the attitude of the sentimental wanderer he felt it yield to his pressure, and walked in.

Every fibre of his past was interwoven with that scene. Long before he had flown there to his first meetings with Halo, he and Laura Lou and her brother had ranged through the decaying garden and waked the echoes of Miss Emily Lorburn’s strange old dwelling. In the arbour at the back of the house Vance had put a first kiss on Laura Lou’s fluttering eyelids; on the doorstep he had sat and waited through a long afternoon for Halo Spear, who had promised to meet him and forgotten her promise; among the musty book-shelves of the library, and under the sad painted gaze of Miss Emily Lorburn, he had first travelled in the realms of gold, with Halo guiding him.

In that setting she came suddenly back to him, poised for flight as he had first known her; then, after her marriage, under a shadow of disquietude torn by laughter and irony, but never dispelled till he took her in his arms on the night of their flight. Thus detached from the uncertainties and irritations of their life together, her renovated image leaned to him from that enchanted world where they had first met. The memory caught him about the heart, and if she had come to him across the lawn at that moment all his scruples and resolves might have been swept away in a flood of tenderness. But he was determined not to abandon himself to such dreams. His future, wherever it led, was to be ruled by realities, not illusions. He had thought he loved her, and he had failed her; she had accepted the fact, and faced it with her usual ironic courage; and the one service his unstable heart could do her now was to leave her in peace and go his way.

He stood for a long time on the lawn, remembering how, when he had first come there, fresh from the mediocrity and uniformity of Euphoria, the house had seemed as vast as a Roman villa and as venerable as a feudal castle. Through its modest doorway he had entered into a legendary past; its shingled tower was Sister Anne’s outlook, its bracketed balconies overhung the perilous foam on which his imagination had voyaged ever since. The old house had been his fairy godmother, and it was only now, as he looked at it again, that he understood.

He went up to the door, studying the shuttered windows, looking for signs of change, catching at each stray tendril of association. Of change he saw little; the ............