A miracle! Some daughter of this house, strayed as a child, found by eccentric travellers, taken to England, reared with love and care to strange exotic beauty, marrying a great landowner so lost in passionate devotion that he gave her all he had, and, dying, left her heir to vast estates.
She following, her family inherit the estate, and come to take possession.
They enter the tall pillared gates; they wander up the shaded avenue, a little group, huddled and silent, timid, ill at ease. They mount the wide, white marble-terraced steps, the children crowding close, the mother frightened, the father striving to hold up this new strange pride under his time-swollen burden of humility and fear.
These towering halls, these broad-curved stairways, these lofty chambers, even the great kitchens and their clustering offices, are to this timid group as wide and desolate as deserts or the sea.
They seek a room, a room that shall be small enough and low enough and dark enough; they reach at last one friendly sheltering little room—crowd into it with tumultuous affection, and find a home!
*
It is home where the heart is!
II.
A new age where new power has conquered a new element, and sky-sailors seek for large discoveries compared to which the old "new world" was but a dooryard venture. Our little world now known from coast to coast and pole to pole; its problems solved, its full powers mastered; its sweet serviceableness and unfailing comfort the common joy of all.
Later science, piling wonder upon wonder, handling radiant energy, packing compressed air for long excursions into outer space, sends out some skyship on tremendous errands of interstellar search. Days, weeks, they flit, with speed incredible, our earth a speck, our moon invisible, our sun a star among the others now; then having done their work, turn the sharp prow and study their vast charts for the return.