It was such a house as, during the two years he had spent up in the high
timber-lands, he had caught sight of only on the rare occasions when he
came within the precincts of a town--a house whose outward aspect, even at
night, suggested something of taste, means, and social position for its
occupants. Slipping nearer still, he saw curtains fluttering in the breeze
of the August evening, and Virginia creeper dropping in heavily massed
garlands from the roof of a columned veranda. A French window was open to
the floor, and within, he could see vaguely, people were seated.

The scene was simple enough, but to the fugitive it had a kind of
sacredness. It was like a glimpse into the heaven he has lost caught by a
fallen angel. For the moment he forgot his hunger and weakness, in this
feast for the heart and eyes. It was with something of the pleasure of
recognizing long-absent faces that he traced the line of a sofa against
the wall, and stated to himself that there was a row of prints hanging
above it. There had been no such details as these to note in his cell, nor
yet in the courtroom which for months had constituted his only change of
outlook Insensibly to himself, he crept nearer, drawn by the sheer spell
of gazing.

Finding a gate leading into the garden, he opened it softly, leaving it
so, in order to secure his retreat. From the shelter of one of the
rounded yew-trees he could make his observations more at ease. He
perceived now that the house stood on a terrace, and turned the garden
front, its more secluded aspect, in his direction. The high hedges, common
in these lakeside villages, screened it from the road; while the open
French window threw a shaft of brightness down the yew-tree walk, casting
the rest of the garden into gloom.

To Norrie Ford, peeping furtively from behind one of the domes of clipped
foliage, there was exasperation in the fact that his new position gave him
no glimpse of the people in the room. His hunger to see them became for
the minute more insistent than that for food. They represented that human
society from which he had waked one morning to find himself cut off, as a
rock is cut off by seismic convulsion from the mainland of which it has
formed a part. It was in a sort of effort to span the gulf separating him
from his own past that he peered now into this room, whose inmates were
only passing the hours between the evening meal and bedtime. That people
could sit tranquilly reading books