There were a dozen trains to enter and get out of before I could be whirled across the country to Heartsease. Now that Heartsease was easily attainable, all the restless world would be fleeing thither, and it would no longer be worthy of its name. I felt my way from town to town, pausing an hour here, another hour there, in an impatient mood, for the last train was behind time, and I feared I should not arrive in the village at the moment of all others I most desired to. Why should I not come at sunset to the parsonage--one from the land of the sunset wearing, as it were, his colors on his heart? The hour is so mysterious and pathetic--the very hour to step in upon the village, for so you can gloat over it all night, before the sun has laid the whole truth bare to you on the following morning. And moreover I had not written Ellen of my intended visit: why should I, when she had been looking for me these ten years at least? Why should I say, "At last I am coming," when a thousand things might have prevented me? Was it not better to walk up the long road from the station at twilight, pass silently through the quiet, familiar streets, and then, as I approached the gate of the parsonage, discover a form waiting there as if expecting some one, but whom it was hard to say? Drawing nearer, I would recognize the form, slender and graceful, and then the face, placid and pale, with the soft hair drawn smoothly over the temples and the thin hands folded in peace. Oh yes, it was much better thus. At the last change of trains, ten miles from Heartsease, a heavy summer shower was drenching the town; the very rain was hot, and the earth steamed lustily. I feared, my plan was spoiled, my meeting at the gate after long years of patient and hopeful waiting. But the rain passed over, and I was again under way. Now every inch of the land was familiar: I recognized old houses and barns and strips of fence and streams that had not been in my mind once in all these years. I knew every block of forest that had been left on the border of the upland fields, and all the meadows, marshy or dry: the very faces of the people seemed to recall some one I had known before. The hills were like lessons learned by heart; and now I came upon the actual haunts of my school-boy days--the wood where we gave our picnics; the red house, a little out of the village, where one of the boys lived--strangely enough, the house I remembered, but the boy's looks and name had gone from me--and then the train stopped. I felt a tingling sensation, as if the blood were coming to the surface all over me.