The vesper-song of some invisible bird called me into the garden, and I walked there alone.  Did I walk utterly alone?  A spirit was with me.  I wandered out to the gate and drew my portmanteau from its hiding-place:  I placed my hand upon the latch; the gate swung easily, but I paused a moment.  Shall I go or shall I stay? asked my heart:  “Stay,” said the spirit that was with me.  I returned to the house and joined in the evening meal:  sorrow sat at the board with us, but not a hopeless sorrow.  The magnetism of her touch had not yet left that home:  it never need, it never will leave it, for it is treasured there.  Her piano was closed, and I would not open it:  any harmony would have been too harsh for the hallowed silence of the place.  Her books, her pictures, her dainty needlework, her words—­all that had been a part of her life—­still lived, though she had left us.

Those were sweet days to me.  Emma and I went side by side to the old haunts—­to most of them, but not all, for there were some I cared no longer to revisit.  Before we had compassed the narrow limits of Heartsease I began to wonder if there was a stone left that would give back to me the impression of my early days:  they all told another story now, and most of them a sad one.  Even the school-room was as a dead thing, though I sat on the old benches and mounted the rostrum whereon I was wont to “speak my piece” with much trepidation of spirit and an inexplicable weakness of the knees.  I wrote my name on the wall in an obscure corner, simply because I didn’t want it to be stricken off from the roll entirely, and then turned back into the street with less regret than I had reckoned on.

Of all the old friends I had known in boyhood, I saw but two besides Emma—­two sisters whose histories were strange and wonderful.  They greeted me as of yore, and we talked of the past with pity mingled with delight.  Dick, my old chum, Emma’s soldier-brother, was miles and miles away:  not a boy of all our tribe was left in Heartsease to tell me the story of the past.  I began to be glad that it was so, for the great gulf that lay between me and the boy I had been seemed to render up no ghosts but were shrouded in sorrow.

There was one spot I might have visited, but did not:  it seemed to me better to wander to and fro about the dear old parsonage with the living spirit near me, and to go out again into the world with the softened influences of that lessened but unbroken circle consoling me, than to seek the new grave that had not yet had time to clothe itself with violets, and the sight of which could have given me nothing but pain.  By and by, I thought, let me return, and when it has healed over and is sweet with summer flowers I will sprinkle rue upon it and breathe her name.  I went back from Heartsease like the bearer of strange news.  We had all sat together and thought, rather than uttered, the memories of the past:  they weighed me down, but they were precious freights.