Now the road turned; the mountain ridge which had closed it in up to this point was now left behind to one side and the top of a spire appeared above the young growth.  It was the top of St. George’s steeple.  The young wanderer paused.  Natural as it was that the highest building of the town should become visible to him before the others, the tender meaning with which his fancy imbued the fact made him forget that it was so.  The slate roof of the church and steeple needed repairs.  This work had been given to his father; and it was the reason, or at least the pretext, for his father’s calling him back home sooner than he had intended.  Perhaps tomorrow he would begin his part of the work.  There, above the wide arch through which he saw the bells moving, the steeple door had been placed.  There the two beams would have to be pushed out to bear the ladder on which he should climb up to the broach-post to fasten to it the rope of the contrivance in which he would make his airy circuit of the roof.  And as it was his nature to bind the cords of his heart to the objects with which his work brought him in touch, he saw a greeting in the sudden appearance of the spire and involuntarily reached out toward it as if he would press a hand offered him in friendship.  Then the thought of the work quickened his step, till a clearing in the wood and his arrival on the highest slope of the mountain showed him his whole home town lying at his feet.

Again he stopped.  There stood his father’s house with the slate shed behind it, not far from it the house where she had lived at the time he went away.  Now she lived in his father’s house, was his father’s daughter, his brother’s wife; and from now on he was to live in the same house with her and to see her daily as his sister-in-law.  His heart beat harder at the thought of her.  But it did not allow any of the hopes which had formerly been bound up with her memory to rise.  His affection had become that of a brother for a sister, and what moved him now was more like anxiety.  He knew that she thought of him with dislike.  She was the only one in his father’s whole house who looked forward to his coming with displeasure.  How had this all come about?  Had there not been a time when she seemed to be fond of him, when she had apparently liked to meet him as much as she later avoided him?  Down below there, in front of the town, the shooting-house stood surrounded by gardens.  How much bigger the trees round the house had grown since he had waved his last greeting to it from this height!  Shortly before he had stood there under that acacia—­it had been a beautiful spring evening, the most beautiful he thought he had ever known—­at the Whitsuntide shooting.  Within all the other young people were dancing; he walked happily round outside the house in which he knew her to be dancing.  Even now he still felt embarrassed with girls and women and did not know how to talk to them; at that time he had felt even more so.  How dearly he would have loved