Lucian arrived at the old vicarage towards the close of the afternoon. He had driven over from Oakborough through a wintry land, and every minute spent in the keen air had added to the buoyancy of his spirits. Never, he thought as he was driven along the valley, did Simonstower look so well as under its first coating of snow, and on the rising ground above the village he made his driver stop so that he might drink in the charm of the winter sunset. At the western extremity of the valley a shelving hill closed the view; on its highest point a long row of gaunt fir-trees showed black and spectral against the molten red of the setting sun and the purpled sky into which it was sinking; nearer, the blue smoke of the village chimneys curled into the clear, frosty air--it seemed to Lucian that he could almost smell the fires of fragrant wood which burned on the hearths. He caught a faint murmur of voices from the village street: it was four o’clock, and the children were being released from school. Somewhere along the moorland side a dog was barking; in the windows of his uncle’s farmhouse, high above the river and the village, lights were already gleaming; a spark of bright light amongst the pine and fir trees near the church told him that Mr. Chilverstone had already lit his study-lamp. Every sound, every sight was familiar--they brought the old days back to him. And there, keeping stern watch over the village at its foot, stood the old Norman castle, its square keep towering to the sky, as massive and formidable as when Lucian had first looked upon it from his chamber window the morning after Simpson Pepperdine had brought him to Simonstower. He bade the man drive on to the vicarage. He had sent no word of his coming; he had more than once descended upon his friends at Simonstower without warning, and had always found a welcome. The vicar came bustling into the hall to him, with no sign of surprise. ‘I did not know they had wired to you, my boy,’ he said, greeting him in the old affectionate way, ‘but it was good of you to come so quickly.’ Lucian recognised that something had happened. ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘No one wired to me; I came down on my own initiative--I wanted to see my uncle on business.’ ‘Ah!’ said the vicar, shaking his head. ‘Then you do not know?--your uncle is ill. He had a stroke--a fit--you know what I mean--this very morning. Your Aunt Judith is across at the farm now. But come in, my dear boy--how cold you must be.’ Lucian went out to the conveyance which had brought him over, paid the driver, and bade him refresh himself at the inn, and then joined the vicar in his study. There again were the familiar objects which spelled Home. It suddenly occurred to him that he was much more at home here or in the farmhouse parlour along the roadside than in his own house in London, and he wondered in vague, indirect fashion why that should be so.