I alighted at the foot of Pope Lane. The wooden posts still stood there to shut out traffic. I walked quickly up the avenue of fragrant limes with the eager expectancy of one who had been years absent instead of days. In the distance I heard the rumble of London. The golden August evening lay in pools upon the pathway. Sensations of the happy past came back. Dead memories stirred, plucking at my heartstrings. I thought of how Ruthita and I had bowled hoops and played marbles on that same gray pavement, making the air ring with our childish voices. I thought of those rare occasions when the Spuffler had carried me away with him into a boy’s world of mysterious small things, which he knew so well how to find. All the comings and goings of school-days, immense exaltations and magnified tragedies, rose before me--Ruthita waiting to catch first sight of me, and Ruthita running beside the dog-cart, with flushed cheeks and hair flying, to share the last of me as I drove away. What had happened since then seemed for the moment but an interlude in the momentous play. Passing between the steeply-rising red-brick walls, dotted with gates, I came to the door through which I had been so eager to escape when it had been locked against me. I reflected that I had not gained much from the new things which I had dragged into my life. The narrowness which I had once detested as imprisoned dullness I now coveted as peaceful security. I found the bell beneath the Virginia creeper. The door was opened by Hetty. Hetty had grown buxom and middle-aged. Her sweetheart had never come for her. The tradesmen no longer made love to her; they left their goods perfunctorily and went out in search of younger faces. Her hips had broadened. The curve between her bust and her waist had vanished. The dream of love was all that she had gained from life. I wondered whether she still told herself impossible stories of the deliverance wrought by marriage. If she did, no signs of her romantic tendencies revealed themselves in her face. Her expression had grown vacantly kind and stolid. To me she was respectful nowadays, and seemed even distressed by the immodesty of the memory that I had once been the little boy whom she had spanked, spoilt, bathed, and dried. She gave a quick cry at catching sight of me, for I had warned no one of my coming. “Sh! where are they?” I asked her. She told me that the master was at work in his study, and that Miss Ruthita and her ma were in the garden. I walked round the house slowly, lasting out the pleasure of their surprise. Nothing seemed to have changed except we people. Sunflowers kept guard in just the same places, like ranks of lean soldiers wearing golden helmets. Along the borders scarlet geraniums flared among the blue of lobelia and the white of featherfew, just as they had when I was a boy. Pigeons, descendants of those whose freedom I had envied, perched on the housetops opposite, or wheeled against the encrimsoned sky.