She made the children promise to abstain from friendship with the Lashers and from numberless other adventures; and at last she broke from them and hurried to the carry-all. Cuff and Teen had gone ahead in the wagon with the luggage. RoBards helped Patty and the baby to the front seat and took his place beside her. Her father and mother were already bestowed in the back of the carriage. RoBards drove away, calling to the children that he would soon be home. He and Patty had little to say of either their secret prides or shames; old age had its eyes upon their shoulder blades, and was perhaps subtly understanding from the glum wisdom of experience that this young couple was gathering also much cargo that could never be thrown overboard and must always be hidden away in the deepest hold. The length of the journey to New York was wonderfully shortened now. RoBards put Patty and her parents and the servants on the stage and she had only to ride as far as Harlem, where she would take the New York and Harlem Railroad train. It had a steam engine and a double track clear to City Hall, and some day it was going to be extended to White Plains, and eventually perhaps to Chatham. When he had seen the stagecoach whirl off with Patty and had seen her handkerchief flaunt its last farewell through the dust, RoBards drove home. Or was it home now? Home seemed to be a something cloudlike trailing after his wife. Home was the immediate neighborhood of his love. His heart ached with anxiety for her. What if she should not arrive safely? The number of stagecoach accidents was astounding: drunken drivers, runaway horses, capsizings, collisions, kept up an endless succession of deaths and cripplings. Thinking of Patty as perhaps doomed already he thought of her with overwhelming tenderness. The very road backward was denuded of the aureole she lent it. It stretched dour and stark in the harsh outlines of autumn. The trees were stripped of leaves; the lanes of their soft borders. Everything was naked and harsh. The wind was ugly, cynical; it tormented the flocks of fallen leaves, sent them into panics of flight with hoarse little cries and scurries. This was no place for a rose like Patty. He rode past the home of the Lashers. It was always autumn there. However, the wild flowers of spring held picnics in the lanes and the weeds put on their Sunday calico; however the peach trees and the plums and cherries in their disordered companies broke forth into hosannas of bloom and pelted the yard and the house with petal confetti, this house and this fence always sagged and creaked; the shutters hung and flapped in the breeze; the family slumped, eternally exhausted from the sheer neglect of industry.