the time of the apple-blossoms there; with his
homesick inward vision he saw the billowed tops of his orchard, all
pink-white. He thought how the apples smelt when they first began to
drop in August on the clean straw that bedded the orchard aisles. It
seemed to him that if he could only be there again for a moment he would
be willing to spend the rest of his life in prison. As it was, he was in
prison; it did not matter how wide the bounds were that kept him from
his home. He hated the vastness of the half world where he could come
and go unmolested, this bondage that masked itself as such ample
freedom. To be shut out was the same as to be shut in.

In the first days of his convalescence, while he was yet too weak to
leave his room, he planned and executed many returns to his home. He
went back by stealth, and disguised by the beard which had grown in his
sickness, and tried to see what change had come upon it; but he could
never see it different from what it was that clear winter night when he
escaped from it. This baffled and distressed him, and strengthened the
longing at the bottom of his heart actually to return. He thought that
if he could once look on the misery he had brought upon his children he
could bear it better; he complexly flattered himself that it would not
be so bad in reality as it was in fancy. Sometimes when this wish
harassed him, he said to himself, to still it, that as soon as the first
boat came up the river from Quebec, he would go down with it, and
arrange to surrender himself to the authorities, and abandon the
struggle.

But as he regained his health, he began to feel that this was a rash and
foolish promise: he thought he saw a better way out of his unhappiness.
It appeared a misfortune once more, and not so much a fault of his. He
was restored to this feeling in part by the respect, the distinction
which he enjoyed in the little village, and which pleasantly recalled
his consequence among the mill-people at Ponkwasset. When he was
declared out of danger he began to receive visits of polite sympathy
from the heads of families, who smoked round him in the evening, and
predicted a renewal of his youth by the fever he had come through
safely. Their prophecies were interpreted by Bird and Pere Etienne, as
with one or other of these he went to repay their visits. Everywhere,
the inmates of the simple, clean little houses, had begun early to
furbish them up for the use of their summer boarders