About his return there was a compelling thrill. He drove from the station in one of the cheap automobiles that had made his father practically a pensioner of the Planters. With an incredulous appreciation that he had once accepted its horizon as the boundary of his life, he examined the familiar landscape and the scar made upon it by the village. Curtly he refused to satisfy the driver's curiosity. He had some business at the little house on the Planter estate.
There, through the nearly stripped trees, it showed, almost audibly confessing its debt to the Planter carpenters, painters, and gardeners. In a clouded light late fall flowers waved from masses of dead leaves. Their gay colours gave them an appearance melancholy and apprehensive.
Here he was back at last, and he wasn't going in at the great gate.
He walked around the shuttered house and crossed the porch where his father had liked to sit on warm evenings. He rapped at the door. Feet shuffled inside. The door swayed open, and his mother stood on the threshold. Most of the changes had come to him, but in her red eyes sparkled a momentary and mournful importance. At first she didn't recognize her son.
"What is it?"
George stooped and kissed her cheek.
"I'm sorry, Mother."
Instead of holding out her arms she drew away, staring with fascination, a species of terror, at his straight figure, at his clothing, at his face that wouldn't coarsen now. When she spoke her voice suggested a placating of this stranger who was her son.
"I didn't think you'd come. I can't believe you're George—my Georgie."
Over her shoulders in the shadowed house he saw the inquisitive faces of women. It was clear that for them such an arrival was more divertive than the sharing of a sorrow that scarcely touched their hearts.