She was running between familiar orchards and fields; the image of reaching home became very present, and a sweetness pervaded her rising excitement at the thought of touching so soon the home-hands. The mountains were thrown back to the horizon of her mind. Between the sandy hummocks, beyond the level salt meadows which she had left green and found russet, she caught glimpses of a great sapphire line. She began looking eagerly for the farm-house that meant she was within a minute of her journey's end. It flashed past. She gathered up her things; she came out on the platform, and with a joyous heart looked for her father's gray face and his hand extended to help her down.
He was not there, and she got off the train alone, half-conscious of a dog-cart not far, with a horse behaving as a horse should not at the locomotive. The superbly indifferent iron monster puffed off, dragging after it its train; the indignant horse quieted down. She heard her name called; the voice was the man's in the dog-cart, it was Damon's. The philosopher hurried towards him with an insanely beating heart, an uplifted, greeting, beaming face.
He helped her in, and his trickle of answers met her stream of questions, and her stream of answers his trickle of questions, as they jogged, tilting along between the dusty roadsides. The warm flood of her home-coming sensations subsided a little, and she turned to look at him, to take a fond inventory of his face—dear old faithful friend, so kind to fetch her himself! Her heart tightened. What was gone wrong with Damon?—Damon, whom she had been picturing so happy, and was just rousing her spirit to question casually concerning Cytherea. Even at that moment they were approaching her dwelling, when the question, if she could make her voice right, not too indifferent, nor yet too interested, would seem so in place.
The grass on the lawn was long and uneven, constellated with twinkling autumn dandelions; the windows were shuttered, the veranda was empty, the chimney smokeless; a forgotten hammock rope, blackened and twisted by the rain, swung from a branch in front of the deserted house, thumping faintly against the tree-trunk. Chloris turned her lengthened face towards Damon; he lifted to hers a pair of very miserable eyes, and said, in an unresonant voice, "You should have got back in time for the cattle-fair. It was better than usual this year. Cookson's little mare took a prize."
"You don't mean it!" faltered Chloris, and looking straight ahead set her lips hard, to keep down an impetuous flood of hatred for Cytherea.
She saw the propriety of continuing to talk; but she could not keep her mind on it. Damon's powers of conversation, too, had failed him. He kept a stolid face to the horse's head; and they drove in silence to her door, where, alighting, she was swallowed in a sea of affectionate fatherly and auntly embraces.
"I may stay to tea, mayn't I?" asked Damon, dully, from his corner, where he seemed sitting in the cold.
Chloris gave him a place beside herself, and treated him like a sick, beloved child; but so tactfully, he could know only that it soothed.
She let him lie on the sofa, afterwards, while she played, and the others slept in the upper chambers.
She played with upturned face, pale and gentle and full of understanding; her eyebrows lifted, her eyes very large and kind. She would have thought that Damon slept, but that now and again he sighed.