Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/96

 was before him, like a garden full of inviting paths; and somewhere in the centre of it, in a secret green recess, she sat waiting, with a bunch of violets gathered for him in her hand, and a girlish smile of welcome trembling in a sort of timorous expectation on her lips.

That thought filled his last week at home with a restless impatience. It was as if he were about to start on a tour of the world, and had a week to wait for his date of sailing. He chafed under the enforced inaction of the long sittings with his mother, looking wistfully out of the window, until she silently reproved herself for keeping him too much indoors and unselfishly let him go. (He had said nothing of his interview with his father, but she did not resent his reticence. Her husband had accustomed her to silence, and, like the deaf, she read faces, without words.) She let him go, and he tramped the streets of Coulton in the footprints of his past, marvelling to see how the life of the little town stood rooted, like a village seen from the window of a railroad car as the years whirled him along. The Park was incredibly small—the Park in which he and Conroy had roamed as if it had been a prairie. His ravine, leafless and frozen, was bare and mean, with a little gurgle of water under thin ice. His aunt bored him. His cousins sat and looked at him, unable to reach his interest, or teased and fought around him as if he were not in the room. He came back to his home like a reluctant visitor, feeling the presence of the taciturn head of the house as soon as he saw the maples that stood