som the last time he had seen them. Well,
time had not stood still with him as it had with Luke Milligan's
cherry orchard, he reflected grimly. His springtime had long gone by.

The few people he met on the road looked at him curiously, for
strangers were not commonplace in Chiswick. He recognized some of the
older among them but none of them knew him. He had been an awkward,
long-limbed lad with fresh boyish colour and crisp black curls when he
had left Chiswick. He returned to it a somewhat portly figure of a
man, with close-cropped, grizzled hair, and a face that looked as if
it might be carved out of granite, so immobile and unyielding it
was--the face of a man who never faltered or wavered, who stuck at
nothing that might advance his plans and purposes, a face known and
dreaded in the business world where he reigned master. It was a cold,
hard, selfish face, but the face of the boy of forty years ago had
been neither cold nor hard nor selfish.

Presently the homesteads and orchard lands grew fewer and then ceased
altogether. The fields were long and low-lying, sloping down to the
misty blue rim of sea. A turn of the road brought him in sudden sight
of the Cove, and there below him was the old Jameson homestead, built
almost within wave-lap of the pebbly shore and shut away into a lonely
grey world of its own by the sea and sands and those long slopes of
tenantless fields.

He paused at the sagging gate that opened into the long, deep-rutted
lane and, folding his arms on it, looked earnestly and scrutinizingly
over the buildings. They were grey and faded, lacking the prosperous
appearance that had characterized them once. There was an air of
failure about the whole place as if the very land had become
disheartened and discouraged.

Long ago, Neil Jameson, senior, had been a well-to-do man. The big
Cove farm had been one of the best in Chiswick then. As for Neil
Jameson, Junior, Robert Turner's face always grew something grimmer
when he recalled him--the one person, boy and man, whom he had really
hated in the world. They had been enemies from childhood, and once in
a bout of wrestling at the Chiswick school Neil had thrown him by an
unfair trick and taunted him continually thereafter on his defeat.
Robert had made a compact with himself that some day he would pay Neil
Jameson back. He had not forgotten it--he never forgot such
things--but he had never seen or heard of Neil Jameson after leaving
Chiswick. He mig