and so indifferent to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it.
He left it all to the architect whom he had known from a child in the
intimacy which bound our families together, though we bodily lived far
enough apart. I loved his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was
their delighted-in and wondered-at friend. Once and once again, and yet
again and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted where it
falls, fell in his house and in mine, during the forty years and more
that we were friends, and endeared us the more to each other.




XXV.

My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part
and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name
through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I
looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and
down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that
leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. The
last morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and I drove
through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him
by his wife's father when they were first married, and been kept all
those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use. Its
springs had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and
severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet
chariot of the negro "spiritual" which I heard him sing with such fervor,
when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way
northward. 'Go Down, Daniel', was one in which I can hear his quavering
tenor now. He was a lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion