"You must go through the house," insisted Edward.
The professor begged off. "No, I'll sit here; it isn't often I see such a fire as this. I've been over it before, and many times, years ago."
The professor was lost in the memory of the happy days he had spent in the old house when his years were less than young Montague's, of the lives which had drifted far away, of the strange fate that had brought the deserted homestead into the hands of a schoolfellow's son, of the odd feeling which beset him when he was being made to feel at home where he had happily been at ease so many days of his young manhood; for the professor was a dreamer, and his dreams showed him often the realities of existence, true and strange. He lived and he saw life. He knew that the strangeness of its fortunes were matched in no tale written or to be written, because at the vital truths humanity stops fear-stricken at the unveiling of the God of the innermost Holies. Still it is the God and still it is the Holy and still the veil hangs there. The Divine hand alone is strong enough to touch it, the Divine eye alone is pure enough to see within, pitying enough, merciful enough. Talk of life's shadows, its sunlights, its surface play; leave the Holiest to Him!
The man saw bright faces there in the flames which went roaring up the great chimney, read old tales in the gleaming embers on the hearth, lived old days, while the echo of gay laughter floated down to him.
Frances and her host were walking through the empty rooms upstairs, the young man pointing eagerly to views of towering peaks silhouetted against the reddening sky, their sides tawny with the russet leaves of oaks or vivid with the evergreens, or gray with bare tossing branches.
From the windows opposite those framing such vistas, she looked into a wide deep valley of clustering hill-tops, low, soft, round, green, crowding close together, running water between,—though this she could not see.
"The grass is green down between those hills the whole year through," he was telling her, "and the water never freezes; that's why it is such a splendid stock-farm. Mr. Payne is very successful. I have been wondering if I should try some stock here."
Frances was scarce heeding, she was looking down on the circle of the lawn before the door, tangled, weed-grown; noting that the long arms of the spirea needed trimming, that the clump of jonquils should be freed from weeds, the waxberry trained, and the roses freed from their long dead branches; it was pitiful to see all this plenty of beauty run to waste.
"Shall we go down?" he asked, seeing she was only half attentive.
"You have not seen the parlor," he paused at the foot of the stairway to say.