r me. For the beauty I had longed for
seemed here so thickly veiled; and more than once I surprised in my
heart a certain regret that I had come home at all. I caught myself
thinking of that immense and trackless country I had left; I even
craved it sometimes, both physically and mentally, as though, for all
its luscious grossness, it held something that nourished and
stimulated, something large, free and untamed that was lacking in this
orderly land, so neatly fenced and parcelled out at home.

The imagined richness of my return, at any rate, was unfulfilled; the
tie with our mother, though deep, was uninspiring; while that other
more subtle and intangible link I had fondly dreamed might be
strengthened, if not wholly proved, was met with a flat denial that
seemed to classify it as nonexistent. Hope, in this particular
connection, returned upon me, blank and unrewarded.... The familiar
scenes woke no hint of pain, much less of questing sweetness. The
glamour of association did not operate. No personal link was
strengthened.

And, when I visited the garden we had known together, the shady path
beneath the larches; saw, indeed, the very chairs that she and I had
used, the framed portrait in the morning-room, the harp itself, now
set with its limp and broken strings in my own chamber--I was unaware
of any ghostly thrill; least of all could I feel that "somebody was
pleased."

Excursion farther afield deepened the disenchantment. The gorse was
out upon the Common, that Common where we played as boys, thinking it
vast and wonderful with the promise of high adventure behind every
prickly clump. The vastness, of course, was gone, but the power of
suggestion had gone likewise. It was merely a Common that deserved
its name. For though this was but the close of May, I found it worn
into threadbare patches, with edges unravelled like those of some old
carpet in a seaside lodging-house. The lanes that fed it were already
thick with dust as in thirsty August, and instead of eglantine,
wild-roses, and the rest, a smell of petrol hung upon hedges that
were quite lustreless. On the crest of the hill, whence we once
thought the view included heaven, I stood by those beaten pines we
named The Fort, counting jagged bits of glass and scraps of faded
newspaper that marred the bright green of the sprouting bracken.

This glorious spot, once sacred to our dreams, was like a great
backyard--the Backyard of the County--while the view we