VI

HOME AGAIN


At last the lake gleamed through the leaves, and the familiar grey chalk
mountains emerged into view, reaching out across the railroad embankment
as with threatening fingers deep down into the water. There, beyond the
smoky black opening of the short tunnel, the church steeple and a corner
of the castle peeped for an instant above the grove.

John Bogdan leaned way out of the train window and looked at everything
with greedy eyes, like a man going over the inventory of his
possessions, all tense and distrustful, for fear something may have been
lost in his absence. As each group of trees for which he waited darted
by, he gave a satisfied nod, measuring the correctness of the landscape
by the picture of it that he carried fairly seared in his memory.
Everything agreed. Every milestone on the highroad, now running parallel
to the railroad tracks, stood on the right spot. There! The flash of the
flaming red copper beech, at which the horses always shied and once came
within an ace of upsetting the carriage.

John Bogdan drew a deep, heavy sigh, fished a small mirror out of his
pocket, and gave his face a final scrutiny before leaving the train. At
each station his face seemed to grow uglier. The right side was not so
bad. A bit of his mustache still remained, and his right cheek was