se-front, with its
double flight of steps meeting before a glazed door under sculptured
trophies, now down the drive toward the grassy cutting through the wood.
Her air was less of expectancy than of contemplation: she seemed not so
much to be watching for any one, or listening for an approaching sound,
as letting the whole aspect of the place sink into her while she held
herself open to its influence. Yet it was no less apparent that the
scene was not new to her. There was no eagerness of investigation in her
survey: she seemed rather to be looking about her with eyes to which,
for some intimate inward reason, details long since familiar had
suddenly acquired an unwonted freshness.

This was in fact the exact sensation of which Mrs. Leath was conscious
as she came forth from the house and descended into the sunlit court.
She had come to meet her step-son, who was likely to be returning
at that hour from an afternoon's shooting in one of the more distant
plantations, and she carried in her hand the letter which had sent her
in search of him; but with her first step out of the house all thought
of him had been effaced by another series of impressions.

The scene about her was known to satiety. She had seen Givre at all
seasons of the year, and for the greater part of every year, since the
far-off day of her marriage; the day when, ostensibly driving through
its gates at her husband's side, she had actually been carried there on
a cloud of iris-winged visions.

The possibilities which the place had then represented were still
vividly present to her. The mere phrase "a French chateau" had called
up to her youthful fancy a throng of romantic associations, poetic,
pictorial and emotional; and the serene face of the old house seated in
its park among the poplar-bordered meadows of middle France, had
seemed, on her first sight of it, to hold out to her a fate as noble and
dignified as its own mien.

Though she could still call up that phase of feeling it had long since
passed, and the house had for a time become to her the very symbol
of narrowness and monotony. Then, with the passing of years, it had
gradually acquired a less inimical character, had become, not again a
castle of dreams, evoker of fair images and romantic legend, but the
shell of a life slowly adjusted to its dwelling: the place one came back
to, the place where one had one's duties, one's habits and one's books,
the place one would naturally live in till