ling quite boyish again.
The years seemed to roll away from him as rifts of sea fog roll away
before a wind.

Even Gloria seemed as if it had never been--aye, and things before
Gloria was, events when he was still really quite a young man.

He cut at the tufted grasses with his stick, swinging it in dexterous
circles as if it had been his sword. He found himself humming a tune
almost unconsciously, but when he paused to consider what the tune was
he found it was the national march of Gloria. Then he stopped humming,
and went on for a while silently and less joyously. But the gladness of
the fine morning, of the clear air, of the familiar place, took
possession of him again. His face once more unclouded and his spirits
mounted.

'The place hasn't changed much,' he said to himself, looking around him
while he walked. Then he corrected himself, for it had changed a good
deal. There were many more red brick houses dotting the landscape than
there had been when he last looked upon it some seven years earlier.

In all directions these red houses were springing up, quaintly gabled,
much verandahed, pointed, fantastic, brilliant. They made the whole
neighbourhood of the Heath look like the Merrie England of a comic
opera. Yet they were pretty in their way; many were designed by able
architects, and pleased with a balanced sense of proportion and an
impression of beauty and fitness. Many, of course, lacked this, were but
cheap and clumsy imitations of a prevailing mode, but, taken all
together, the effect was agreeable, the effect of the varied reds,
russet, and scarlet and warm crimson against the fresh green of the
grass and trees and the pale faint blue of the May sky.

To the observer they seemed to suit very well the place, the climate,
the conditions of life. They were infinitely better than suburban and
rural cottages people used to build when he was a boy. His mind drifted
away to the kind of houses he had been more familiar with of late years,
houses half Spanish, half tropical; with their wide courtyards and gaily
striped awnings and white walls glaring under a glaring sun.

'Yes, all this is very restful,' he thought--'restful, peaceful,
wholesome.' He found himself repeating softly the lines of Browning,
beginning, 'Oh to be in England now that April's here,' and the
transitions of thought carried him to that other poem beginning, 'It was
roses, roses, all the way,' with its satire on fallen ambition. Thinking