The day shone about them. Rain of the night had brought into late autumn a sense of spring. Spring and autumn seemed to touch across shortened winter. The air held a divine, sweet freshness. They were aware of new life, and all objects of perception tossed back vigor and luster.
"The world renews—the world renews!" sang the river.
A little later Robert and Frances Dane at their window saw, coming up from the river, a somewhat worn automobile. Stopping before the porch the driver and owner descended and mounted the steps. "There's an old type!" said Robert. "Tall and thin, black clothes and soft hat, low collar and string tie, white hair, mustache and imperial—look, Frances, it's a picture! Once it was the horse, and he swung himself down—then the carriage, and at the door he helped out the ladies. Now it's the car. To-morrow he will descend from the airship—just like that!"
She looked over his shoulder. "It's old Major Hereward from Oakwood. He was here four years ago, that time I came alone. He's all the past! But that car's symbolic, too. He's all the past beginning to say, 'For all my fighting I begin to find myself, with all I care for, here in the present—perhaps also in the future!' He's beginning to think that it may be so with the airship. There with all that he really, really cares for! 'I always said that they couldn't get along without me, and now I begin to see that neither can I get along without them!'"
Major Hereward appeared at the dinner table. It seemed that he, too, was a cousin of Linden's, on the other side from the Danes. His place was Oakwood, twenty miles away. Old Major Linden and he had been boyhood friends. He breathed knowledge of Sweet Rocket in ancient days. His manner to Marget was delightful, though perhaps he still held in comparison, in a "this—that," Sweet Rocket House and the overseer's house. His manner to all was delightful—like old wine.
Robert Dane pondered that, and also Frances's words of the morning. Like others, he could speak as though the past, the present, and the future were islands with nothingness between. But truly he knew it was not so, and he assumed that much self-knowledge in those to whom he spoke. Now he had it, in a flash of vision, how the old wine and wheat, how the old strength of man and woman, did go on. All within the whole flashed and changed. But the whole held all. The tangential itself only went so far, then returned, and was met and welcomed. The prodigal son. He saw that contrary winds were not so contrary after all. "In the whole, and in the whole only, I am not contrary to him nor he to me. In the end one sail and one wind—and the sail due to arrive and the wind favorable."
That afternoon Major Hereward walked over the place; with him, Linden and Curtin. "I came to talk to you about something, Richard. But we'll leave it till night. I can always pull things together better then—after the day. Here's the oak Phil Linden and I planted the day we heard of First Manassas! He was eighteen and I was sixteen. The next year we both went in."
They stood beneath the tree. Said Curtin, "Much water has gone over the wheel since then!"