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He goes his own way always, tricky and furtive and lonelier than any other human being I have ever known. It is loneliness that looks out of his eyes, really, even when he is mocking and sneering," the colonel meditated. Then he sighed and went back to the tabulation of his lists of wills. The day was growing strong in the maple-grove behind Matocton.
The brightness of the morning was not lost on me, and before I reached the maple-grove I was buoyant and happy. He started, and for a moment we both stood still and did not speak. I could only think with confusion of my emotion when he sang. "You are always early," he said, with his slight, very slight, foreign accent, "earlier than yesterday by half an hour," he added, looking at his watch.
Patricia sat in the great maple-grove that stands behind Matocton, and pondered over a note from her husband, who was in Lichfield superintending the appearance of the July number of the Lichfield Historical Association's Quarterly Magazine. Mr. Charteris lay at her feet, glancing rapidly over a lengthy letter, which was from his wife, in Richmond.
It was, perhaps, on these that Colonel Musgrave pondered so intently. Once the farthingaled and red-heeled gentry came in sluggish barges to Matocton, and the broad river on which the estate faces was thick with bellying sails; since the days of railroads, one approaches the mansion through the maple-grove in the rear, and enters ignominiously by the back-door.
Then the engine-exhaust ceased; and a voice, raised in some annoyance, hailed loudly through the maple-grove: "Hello! Hello? What's wrong here?" Gabriel stepped to the sugar-house door: "Here! Come here!" he shouted in a ringing voice that echoed wildly from between his hollowed palms. As the motorist still sat there, uncomprehending, Gabriel made his way toward the road.
At times often indeed his thoughts wandered to the maple-grove and the old sugar-house, far away on the Hudson. Memories of the girl would not be banished, nor longings for her. Who she might be, he still knew not. Unwilling to learn, he had refrained from looking up the number he had copied from the plate of the wrecked machine.
Laying her down in the soft grass along the wall, he ran back to where the wraps were, and, detaching them from the branches, quickly regained the road once more. "Now for the old sugar-house in the maple-grove," said he. "Poor shelter, but the best to be had. Thank heaven it's fair weather, and warm!"
It really seemed, now that Patricia had put an ending to their meetings in the maple-grove, Fate was conspiring to bring them together. However, as Mr. Charteris pointed out, there could be no possible objection to this conspiracy, since they had decided that their friendship was to be of a purely platonic nature.
"Oh, Sophie! you know what I mean." "Well, I confess to liking a higher development of intellectual nature than I find in Redleaf, but I feel that I belong to it, I ought to be here; and feeling atones for much lack of mind, it gets up higher, nearer into the soul. You know, Anna, we ought to love Redleaf. Look across that maple-grove." "What is there?" "Chimneys." "Well, what of them?"
The soft whirring sound of a bird's wings in the air roused her: as it flew past the window she saw that it was one of the yellow-hammers, which still built their nests in the maple-grove behind the house. "Ah," thought she, "I suppose it can't be one of the same birds we saw that day. But it's going on errands just the same. I wonder, dear Seth, if mine are nearly done."
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