COLONEL DENBIGH was walking to and fro at the back of his house, considering it. There was no doubt at all that it needed a new coat of paint. It needed it almost as much as the colonel needed the extra money to pay for it. He chuckled a little, pulling at the ends of his long white moustache. “Neither of us likely to get it,” he thought, “and I reckon I look almost as much out of repair as the old place does anyway!” Then his eye traveled down the long road which led to the town. He was expecting his granddaughter and the morning newspaper. Viewed from this angle, the road was a thing of beauty. It turned a curve above the crossing and passed through a grove of chestnuts. They were yellowish-white now with bloom. Beneath them the road ran like a ribbon, while on either hand the colonel glimpsed the friendly roofs of his neighbors’ houses. The farthest one, set back among the trees, was Johnson Carter’s. Over there was Judge Jessup’s; beyond that was the spire of the oldest church. In the graveyard behind it four generations of Denbighs lay buried. At the corner of Mrs. Payson’s place a blossoming pear tree stood like a lovely ghost. The warm, still atmosphere was filled with the fragrance of early blossomings, here and there a field was pink with clover. There was a warmth, a stirring, the promise of a hundred springs in the rich loam, where the new grass thrust up its strong young blades, and in the old apple-tree that showered the colonel’s shoulder with its falling petals. He found some of them on his sleeve and looked at them musingly; he was thinking of the days when he had gathered apples from that tree for his wife. Mrs. Denbigh had been dead many years, and their only son and his wife. Gone, too! The old man took off his hat and passed his hand absently over his white head, a little sadness in the very gesture. Virginia and he were the only ones left, he reflected, and then he smiled. He always smiled when he thought of Virginia. He was very proud of his young granddaughter. “There’s a girl for you!” he thought fondly, “pretty as a picture. A straight-thinking kind of a young creature, too, bless her heart!” He was sorry that his estate did not warrant a little of the old-time style for her. She deserved it, but--the colonel shook his head, eying the house again. It was a rambling, old-fashioned affair with a belvidere on the flat roof and two verandas. It had a beauty of its own, fortunately, for it had lost a good deal of its exterior decorations and it was deplorably weather-stained on the north side.