The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Return, by Walter de la Mare

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Title: The Return

Author: Walter de la Mare

Posting Date: February 22, 2009 [EBook #3075]
Release Date: February, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RETURN ***

Produced by Eve Sobol

THE RETURN

Walter de la Mare

Transcriber's Note:

This edition has single quotation marks for direct quotes,
and double for indirect quotes.

There are no periods in the original text after
Mr
Mrs
Dr

"Look not for roses in Attalus his garden, or wholesome
flowers in a venomous plantation. And since there is scarce
any one bad, but some others are the worse for him; tempt
not contagion by proximity and hazard not thyself in the
shadow of corruption."

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

CHAPTER ONE

The churchyard in which Arthur Lawford found himself wandering that mild
and golden September afternoon was old, green, and refreshingly still.
The silence in which it lay seemed as keen and mellow as the light--the
pale, almost heatless, sunlight that filled the air. Here and there
robins sang across the stones, elvishly shrill in the quiet of harvest.
The only other living creature there seemed to Lawford to be his own
rather fair, not insubstantial, rather languid self, who at the noise
of the birds had raised his head and glanced as if between content and
incredulity across his still and solitary surroundings. An increasing
inclination for such lonely ramblings, together with the feeling that
his continued ill-health had grown a little irksome to his wife, and
that now that he was really better she would be relieved at his absence,
had induced him to wander on from home without much considering where
the quiet lanes were leading him. And in spite of a peculiar melancholy
that had welled up into his mind during these last few days, he had
certainly smiled with a faint sense of the irony of things on lifting
his eyes in an unusually depressed moodiness to find himself looking
down on the shadows and peace of Widderstone.

With that anxious irresolution which illness so often