e. Thank you, Stephen."

XXII

It was early in April, an insidiously warm morning with the ailanthus
trees in bud before the State House, when Jasper Penny left the court
room where Essie had been freed. Provision had been made for her--she
had had a severe collapse during the trial--and a feeling almost of
renewed liberty of spirit permeated Jasper, as, with his overcoat on an
arm, he turned to the left and walked over the street in the blandly
expanding mildness. A train left shortly for Jaffa, and he was bound
directly home, to Myrtle Forge, anxious to steep himself in the echo of
the trip hammer mingled with the poignant harmony of spring sounds
drifting from the farm and woods. He was possessed by a sharpened hunger
for all the--now recognized--beauty of the place of his allegiance and
birth, the serenity of the acres Gilbert Penny had beaten out of the
wild of the Province. He was astonishingly conscious of himself as a
part of the whole Penny succession, proud of Gilbert, of Howat, who had
always so engaged his fancy, of Casimir, and Daniel, his own father.
Theirs was a good heritage; their part of the earth, the ring of their
iron, his particular characteristic of a black Penny, formed a really
splendid entity.

The low, horizontal branches of the beech tree on the lawn, older than
the dwelling, opposed a pleasant variety on the long facade, built of
stone with an appearance of dark pinkish malleability masking its
obduracy. His mother was awaiting him on the narrow portico, and he at
once told her of Essie's release. They stood together, gazing out across
the turf, faintly emerald, over the public road, at the grey, solid
group of farm buildings beyond. The farmer's daughter, in a white slip,
emerged against the barnyard, and called the chickens in a high, musical
note, scattering grain to a hysterical feathery mob. The air was still
with approaching twilight; the sun slipped below the western trees and
shadows gathered under the lilac bushes; the sky was April green.

"Your father has been dead twelve years," Gilda Penny said unexpectedly.
He looked down and saw that she was decrepit, an old woman. Her mouth
had sunken, her ears projected in dry folds from her scant strands of
hair. He recalled Daniel Barnes Penny; the earliest memories of his
mother, a vigorous, brown-faced woman with alert, black eyes,
quick-stepping, dictatorial in the sphere of her house and dependents.
One after the other, lik