At last! The train crept into the little station, nestling on the edge of a wood, and there was Fowey, homely, friendly little Fowey, so strange and yet so familiar; strange to eyes that had so lately looked upon the cities of the East; familiar to the man who had been reared in the neighbourhood, whose first impressions of God’s earth had stamped harbour and hills upon his brain, like an indelible picture. There was Masters’s fly, an eminently respectable vehicle that never touted for chance passengers, waiting for him. He was expected, evidently. “Did Mrs. Disney send you?” he asked the driver. “Yes, sir.” How thoughtful of the young wife, who might be forgiven if she had left such a small duty unfulfilled. Yet he would have liked to see her sweet self at the station--only, as he had argued with himself just now, it would have discounted the home-welcome. It would have been an anti-climax. Dearly as he loved that home river, and those fertile hills, and beautiful as they were after their kind, they could but seem small and tame to eyes that had looked upon the glories of the East. Disney contemplated the scene with a touch of sad surprise, wondering at this miniature loveliness; recalling the day when those steep hillsides, where the red cattle were grazing in the mists of eventide, had seemed grand in his sight. Now they had a kind of pitiful prettiness. His heart yearned towards them with compassion for their insignificance. For nearly two years he had been moving about with his company in the land of jungle and mountain, and in that vast table-land through which the Salween river runs down to the Gulf of Martaban; and after those wider horizons, he found himself in a narrow road, shut in by grassy hills, and hugging the margin of a silver thread that called itself a river. There is always a tinge of melancholy in that hour after sundown; and Martin Disney’s heart saddened a little as he looked at the quiet river, and the shadows on the hillside--that pale mistiness of summer evening which gives a ghostly touch to all things, as if it were a brief revelation of a spirit world. It is an hour at which even a strong man’s heart is apt to sink with a vague sense of fear. The fly drew up at the little wooden gate between high hedges of escalonia, with glossy leaves and bright red blossom. A slender figure in a white gown was visible on the threshold, as Disney sprang out of the fly, and while the flyman was lifting down the luggage, that airy form flitted across the lawn, and Colonel Disney’s wife was standing shyly within the open gate, almost as if she had come out to receive a stranger.