Esther drew a deep breath.  It was certainly good to feel the strain lifting, to have time for dreams again.  The time was so pitifully short now.  Two more weeks and she would leave Coombe behind her.  The old life would be definitely over and done with.  Looking back, she could see that it had been a happy life, and the future looked so dark.  In youth, all life’s happenings seem so terribly final.  Every parting feels like a parting forever.  Esther felt quite sure that she would never return to Coombe.

In the week before the wedding, freed from her continual attendance upon her mother, she unobtrusively paid farewell to all her old haunts and favourite places.  It was a sweet sadness.  She did not taste the sweet, but it was there.  As one grows older, one does not linger over sad moments.  It is because the sweet has vanished, only the bitter remains.  But in untried youth sadness has a touch of beauty, a glamour of romance which shrouds its deepest pain.  It is as if something within us, infinitely wise, were smiling, knowing well that for the young there is always to-morrow.

The maple by the schoolhouse turned early that year.  When Esther, in her pilgrimage, came to say good-bye it welcomed her with all the glory of autumn.  Against its greener brothers it stood out, naming, defiant.  Beside it, the red pump seemed no longer red.  Red and yellow, its falling leaves tossed themselves into the girl’s lap as she sat upon the porch steps.  It is almost certain that, as Esther gathered them, she compared her sad heart to a leaf which had fluttered from the tree of happy life.  There seemed no outlook for her.  She could not see through winter into spring.

The school children with their new teacher (whom Esther could not help but feel was sadly incompetent) had all gone home and it was very quiet on the porch steps.  She closed her eyes and dreamed and clearly through her dream she heard, as she had heard that first morning in early summer, a determinedly cheerful, yet husky, voice singing.  Some one was coming down the hill.

     “From Wimbleton to Wombleton is fifteen miles;
      From Wombleton to Wimbleton is fifteen miles;
      From Wimbleton to Wombleton, from Wombleton to Wimbleton,
      From Wimbleton to Wombleton,—­”

The song trailed off into silence as it had done before.  The girl’s closed eyes smarted with tears—­“Oh, it is a very long way!” she murmured, and burying her face in fallen leaves she felt that at last she knew the meaning of despair.

But though his voice had echoed through Esther’s dream, Callandar was not on the long hill nor anywhere near it.  Unlike Esther, he paid no farewells during these last days.  He avoided the hill particularly and drove past the schoolhouse seldom and always at top speed.  If the sight of the turning maples moved him at all it was not because he compared his lost happiness to a fallen leaf.  Callandar was long past such gentle sadnesses as these.  Every day he filled as full of work as possible.  He walked far and hard in hope of tiring himself into dreamless sleep at night.  And every day his face grew older, greyer, more sternly set.