gone. I was just beginning to see the starker outlines of a world that
has shaken off the shadows of youth when I saw him again.

I remember it was a morning early in autumn. The wind was fresh off the
sea, making the pounding of the surf on the beach seem very near as I
urged my horse from the neat, quiet streets of the town up the rutted
lane that led to the Shelton house. The tang of the salt marshes was in
the wind, and a touch of frost over the meadows told me the ducks would
soon be coming in from shelter. Already the leaves were falling off the
tall elms, twisting in little spirals through the clear October sunlight.

And yet, in spite of the wind and the sea and the clean light of the
forenoon, there was a sadness about the place, and an undercurrent of
uneasy silence that the rustling of the leaves and the noise of the surf
only seemed to accentuate. It was like the silence that falls about a
table when the guests have left it, and the chairs are empty and the
lights are growing dim. It was the silence that comes over all places
where there should be people, and yet where no one comes.

The shrubbery my grandfather had brought from England was more wild and
disordered than when I had seen it last. The weeds had choked the formal
garden that once grew before the front door. And the house--I had often
pictured that house in my memory--with its great arched doorway, its
small-paned windows and its gambrel roof. Once it had seemed to me a
massive and majestic structure. Now those ten years had made it shrink to
a lonely, crumbling building that overlooked the harbor mouth. Clematis
had swarmed over the bricks, a tangle of dead and living vines. The paint
was chipping from the doors and window ledges. Here and there a shutter
had broken loose and was sagging on rusted hinges. Houses are apt to
follow the direction their owners take.