"And yet he went wrong, the more's the pity."
"It's a funny thing," commented the first speaker, who was evidently of a philosophic bent, "but I've often noticed that a good wife is apt to make a bad husband. It looks somehow as if male human nature, like the Irish members, is obliged to sit on the Opposition bench. The only example that ever counts with it, is an example that urges the other way."
"Well, what about this particular instance? I hope at least that she has come into the old man's money?"
"Nobody can tell, but it's generally believed that the two children will get the most of it. The son left a boy and a girl when he went to prison, you know."
"Ah, that's rather a pity, isn't it?"
"Well, I can't say—they've got good blood as well as bad, when it comes to that. My daughter went to school with the girl, and she was said to be, by long odds, the most popular member of her class. She graduated last spring, and people tell me that she has turned out to be the handsomest young woman in Botetourt."
"No, dark and tall, with those snapping blue eyes of her grandmother's——"
So Alice was no longer the little girl in short white skirts, outstanding like a ballet dancer's! There was a pang for him in the thought, and he tried in vain to accustom himself to the knowledge that she would meet him to-night as a woman, not as a child. He remembered the morning when she had run out, as he passed up the staircase, to beg him to come in to listen to her music lesson; and with the sound of the stumbling scales in his ears, he felt again that terrible throbbing of his pulses and the dull weight of anguish which had escaped at last in an outburst of bitterness.
With a jolting motion the train drew up into the little station, and following the crowd that pressed through the door of the car, he emerged presently into the noisy throng of Negro drivers gathered before the rusty vehicles which were waiting beside the narrow pavement. Pushing aside the gaily decorated whips which encircled him at his approach, he turned, after a moment's hesitation, into one of the heavily shaded streets, which seemed to his awakened memory to have remained unaltered since the afternoon upon which he had left the town almost twenty years ago. The same red and gold maples stirred gently above his head; the same silent, green-shuttered houses were withdrawn behind glossy clusters of microphylla rose-creepers. Even the same shafts of sunshine slanted across the roughly paved streets, which were strewn thickly with yellowed leaves. It was to Ordway as if a pleasant dream had descended upon the place, and had kept unchanged the particular golden stillness of that autumn afternoon when he had last seen it. All at once he realised that what Tappahannock needed was not progress, but age; and he saw for the first time that the mellowed charm of Botetourt was relieved against the splendour of an historic background. Not the distinction of the present, but the enchantment of the past, produced this quality of atmosphere into which the thought of Tappahannock entered like a vulgar discord. The dead, not the living, had built these walls, had paved these streets, had loved and fought and starved beneath these maples; and it was the memory of such solemn things that steeped the little town in its softening haze of sentiment. A thrill of pleasure, more intense than any he had known for months, shot through his heart, and the next instant he acknowledged with a sensation of shame that he was returning, not only to his people, but to his class. Was this all that experience, that humiliation, could do for one—that he should still find satisfaction in the refinements of habit, in the mere external pleasantness of life? As he passed the old church he saw that the sparrows still fluttered in and out of the ivy, which was full of twittering cries like a gigantic bird's nest, and he had suddenly a ghostly feeling as if he were a moving shadow under shadowy trees and unreal shafts of sunlight. A moment later he almost held his breath lest the dark old church and the dreamy little town should vanish before his eyes and leave him alone in the outer space of shadows.