I went past the house where my mother and I had lived so many years. It was so changed I should not have recognized it, repainted and modernized with much show of glass and bow-windows. There were few people to be seen along the white walks until I met the stream from the post-office. Old men and boys, shy girls and children, came out with their letters and papers just as in the old time. Some of the men, grown corpulent and gray, I recognized with the old feeling of reverence and love, and stopped to speak with them. But Belfield life, slow and stagnant though it was, was busy enough to have filled their minds with fresher memories, and I was so nearly forgotten that there was small pleasure in reminding them of the lad who had grown from babyhood into a tall stripling among them. My sentiment passed. I looked about more coldly even at the street that led to the cottage where Georgy Lenox lived, and went on briskly to the great stone house of the Holts. Georgy would be there of course: impossible that another Easter could have passed without her being a bride. I wondered as I entered the open iron gate what she would say to me. The place had seemed splendid to me as a boy, and I well remembered how all the beautiful wonders of the spring blossomed here as nowhere else. But now these grounds too seemed to have suffered a change: there was an air of neglect about the unpruned hedges, with straggling blossoms running riotously over fence and shrubbery; the beds of hyacinths and tulips were trampled, and as I neared the house I saw that the blinds swung carelessly and the old look of thrift and prosperity was quite absent. Still, I observed all this dreamily, wondering, as returned travellers are apt to do, if the change were in the things themselves or in my own eyes. "Perhaps," thought I, "Jack and his wife live in New York," when, suddenly answering my doubt, Jack himself came down the avenue in his light wagon. I stepped aside, standing still, and he regarded me at first absently, then with startled curiosity, and sharply drew his skittish mare back on her haunches. "Good God, Floyd!" said he, "how glad I am to see you!" We looked straight in each other's face for a time, and his features worked, as he regarded me, with some emotion. "You were going to the house?" said he. "Nobody could see you. I have been driving father to the factories to-day, and he is not so well after it, and my mother is with him. I have to be back at twelve, so jump in and come out with me." I obeyed him. It was but two years since we had parted, but he had aged and seemed quite different from the Jack Holt of former times. He was roughly dressed, and, though scrupulously neat and shaven, looked, I am sure, fifteen years my senior. He touched his whip, and the mare plunged down the avenue at a pace too disconcerting to allow either of us to speak for a few moments, and we were at least a mile away before her swinging canter subsided into a trot.