e house on the Planter estate.

There, through the nearly stripped trees, it showed, almost audibly
confessing its debt to the Planter carpenters, painters, and gardeners.
In a clouded light late fall flowers waved from masses of dead leaves.
Their gay colours gave them an appearance melancholy and apprehensive.

Here he was back at last, and he wasn't going in at the great gate.

He walked around the shuttered house and crossed the porch where his
father had liked to sit on warm evenings. He rapped at the door. Feet
shuffled inside. The door swayed open, and his mother stood on the
threshold. Most of the changes had come to him, but in her red eyes
sparkled a momentary and mournful importance. At first she didn't
recognize her son.

"What is it?"

George stooped and kissed her cheek.

"I'm sorry, Mother."

Instead of holding out her arms she drew away, staring with fascination,
a species of terror, at his straight figure, at his clothing, at his
face that wouldn't coarsen now. When she spoke her voice suggested a
placating of this stranger who was her son.

"I didn't think you'd come. I can't believe you're George--my Georgie."

Over her shoulders in the shadowed house he saw the inquisitive faces of
women. It was clear that for them such an arrival was more divertive
than the sharing of a sorrow that scarcely touched their hearts.

George went in. He remembered most of the faces that disclosed
excitement while fawning upon his prosperity. He received an unpleasant
impression that these poor and ignorant people concealed a dangerous
envy, that they would be glad to grasp in one moment, even of violence,
all that it had taken him years of difficult struggle to acquire.
Whether that was so or not they ought not to stand before him as if his
success were a crown. He tried to keep contempt from his voice.

"Please sit down. I want to talk to my mother. Where----"

With slow steps she crossed the kitchen and opened the door of the
parlour, beckoning. He followed, knowing what he would find in that
uncomfortable, gala room of the poor.

He closed the door. In the half light he saw standing on trestles an
oblong box altogether too large for the walls that seemed to crowd it.
He had no feeling that anything of his father was there. He realized
with a sense of helpless regret that all that remained to him of that
unhappy man were the ghosts of such emotions as avarice, fear, and the
instinct to sacrifice one's ow