Standing there in the caressing sun, with achievement behind him and the crown of achievement before, Thomas looked back on the long walk in the rain, the dull sands and the grey and sodden marsh. Under the waning light and the veil of the wet they had looked all one, all an untouched waste, unclaimed of any but the sea. And to-night even the sea seemed to refuse a thing so desolate and bare, leaving it lying as if accursed between heaving water and the richer land. The younger brother, tramping the dyked road, had come upon Bob, slouching slowly ahead, a dreary figure still drearier than the day. The farm, when it stood up to them on the flat, looked lonely and helpless beyond words, a lost and futile thing of no account. They could have sworn that it was empty and that no one moved in the rooms, either human or ghost; that neither chair nor bed nor old press held a trace of souls that were gone. Only those who loved it would not mock at its name to-night. But as they came nearer by degrees, and its blank face took something of meaning and shape, they heard the thin voice of a violin. They had stopped, he and Bob, by the meadow-gate, and listened awhile to the trembling sweetness charming the sad marsh. It had seemed the smallest thing in the world between the vastness of earth and sky, and perhaps also the bravest thing in the world as well. They had forgotten for a moment how the rain was beating over the fence. They had forgotten the untended fields and neglected home. They had even forgotten the probable errand on which they were bent, the oppression of which had clogged their feet as they came. They remembered together little things out of the past ... a wooden cradle with carved sides ... apples in the orchard ... long paddles on warm sands ... skating ... the red light of a hearth ... an aproned form with a face that was always looking out, set for them at every window, watching for them at each door. Every picture they saw was bathed in sun or fire, because the notes of the fiddle were touching it with gold. Thomas forgot while he listened that life was twisting itself into knots in his helpless hands. Out there, while the fiddle spoke, Agnes still loved him and had never looked aside. And perhaps Bob, too, found an old dream waiting on the desolate road. The life of the house seemed to sink when the fiddle stopped, and as they came towards it across the field with heavy, squelching steps, it had the effect of retreating instead of drawing near. Even when the door opened at the click of the garden gate, showing their father’s figure in the square, the impression was that of a shadow opening in a shadow’s face. They had gone in silently, their mood gentled by that singing voice over the marsh, and the door closing behind them had shut out the rain but nothing else. The dusk and sadness claiming both land and sea were all through the lost farmhouse as well.