When he came at last what profoundly shocked her was none of this; but that to the superficial eye he had not changed at all. His hair, perhaps, was a little shorter than she remembered; his face was not exactly pale; it was more as if he had sat up too late, and was having an off day. As for the smile for which she hoped and longed, it began when he saw her running toward him, very swiftly for a heavy old woman, and it ended on her cheek.
"My old dear!" he said.
He took her hand and swung it as children do, and walked beside her into the cottage.
The spickness and spanness of it smote him between the eyes; the imagination and the taste which had changed it from a hunting-lodge into a gentleman's house, and the tact which had done away with the photographs of friends, and all things that could remind him of old days. He passed the whole house in review from top to bottom, and gratitude to the old servant grew very warm in the tired heart.
They stepped out from the living-room to the edge of the cliff and looked down the great valley.
"There was no time," said Martha, tremulous with joy, for she had been much praised, "to put the landscape to rights."
The Poor Boy looked up into the blue vault of heaven.
"Stone walls," he said, "and that, have been my landscape."
"But now," she said, "any day you like you can view the world from here to the North Pole."
He smiled.