The moving in recalled the earliest days of their life at Spring Garden.  Again “Muddie” was busy, not with soap and water only, but with the whitewash brush.  Again their hearts were blythe with the pleasing sense of change—­of the opening up of a new vista of there was no knowing what happiness—­just as children welcome any change for the change itself, always expecting to find pleasant surprises upon a new and untried road.

But there was a difference in themselves since the moving into the Spring Garden Cottage, which had been so gradual that they were scarcely conscious of it.  The years since then lay heavily upon them.  They showed plainly in the deepened lines in Mother Clemm’s face, in the deepened anxiety in her Mater Dolorosa eyes, in the frost upon the locks that peeped from under her immaculate widow’s cap.  They showed in the fragile figure of Virginia—­once so full of sweet curves;—­in the ethereal look that had come into the once rounded cheeks and full pouting lips, in the transparency of her skin and in the sweet eyes that when not filled with the merry laughter that had through thick and thin filled her dwelling place with sunshine and music, had a faraway expression in them, as if they were looking into another world.

They showed most of all in The Dreamer himself.  To him these years had been years of fierce battle; battle, not for wealth, but for bread; battle not so much for selfish ambition as for his country, and in a high sense—­for he had fought valiantly to win a place for America in the world of letters; battle with himself—­with the devils that sought mastery over his spirit—­the devil of excitement and exhilaration that lay in the bottom of the cup, the devil of blessed forgetfulness, accompanied by magical dreams that dwelt in the heart of the poppy, the devil of melancholy and gloom to whom he felt a certain charm in yielding himself, the devil of restlessness and dissatisfaction with whatsoever lay within his grasp—­a dog-and-shadow sort of desire to drop the prize in hand in a chase after that of his vision,—­the impish devil of the perverse.

At times he had been victorious, at other times there had been defeat.  But always the warfare had been fierce and the scars remained to tell the story.  They remained in the emaciation and the deep lines of his still beautiful face; remained in the drooping curves of the mouth; remained above all in the ineffable sadness of the large, deep, luminous eyes.

Yet that sweet spring day when the three were moving into Fordham cottage, the years that had wrought upon them thus were as they had not been.