dition that miraculously was not dead, since after all the
years it had begun to put forth these vigorous shoots....

What Janet chiefly realized was the delicious, contented sense of having
come, visually at least, to the home for which she had longed. But her
humour was that of a child who has strayed, to find its true dwelling
place in a region of beauty hitherto unexplored and unexperienced,
tinged, therefore, with unreality, with mystery,--an effect enhanced by
the chance stillness and emptiness of the place. She wandered up and down
the Common, whose vivid green was starred with golden dandelions; and
then, spying the arched and shady vista of a lane, entered it, bent on
new discoveries. It led past one of the newer buildings, the library--as
she read in a carved inscription over the door--plunged into shade again
presently to emerge at a square farmhouse, ancient and weathered, with a
great square chimney thrust out of the very middle of the ridge-pole,--a
landmark left by one of the earliest of Silliston's settlers. Presiding
over it, embracing and protecting it, was a splendid tree. The place was
evidently in process of reconstruction and repair, the roof had been
newly shingled, new frames, with old-fashioned, tiny panes had been put
in the windows; a little garden was being laid out under the sheltering
branches of the tree, and between the lane and the garden, half finished,
was a fence of an original and pleasing design, consisting of pillars
placed at intervals with upright pickets between, the pickets sawed in
curves, making a line that drooped in the middle. Janet did not perceive
the workman engaged in building this fence until the sound of his hammer
attracted her attention. His back was bent, he was absorbed in his task.

"Are there any stores near here?" she inquired.

He straightened up. "Why yes," he replied, "come to think of it, I have
seen stores, I'm sure I have."

Janet laughed; his expression, his manner of speech were so delightfully
whimsical, so in keeping with the spirit of her day, and he seemed to
accept her sudden appearance in the precise make-believe humour she could
have wished. And yet she stood a little struck with timidity, puzzled by
the contradictions he presented of youth and age, of shrewdness,
experience and candour, of gentility and manual toil. He must have been
about thirty-five; he was hatless, and his hair, uncombed but not
unkempt, was greying at the temples; his eye