He
would arrive at the end of the week.
It was the first of May!
CHAPTER X
One of the great facts of the world I hold to be the registration in
the Universe of every past scene and thought.
F. W. M.
No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least
inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the
walls of memory.
This little village, that Henry Rogers was thus to revisit after so
long an interval, can boast no particular outstanding beauty to lure
the common traveller. Its single street winds below the pine forest;
its tiny church gathers close a few brown-roofed houses; orchards
guard it round about; the music of many fountains tinkle summer and
winter through its cobbled yards; and its feet are washed by a
tumbling stream that paints the fields with the radiance of countless
wild-flowers in the spring. But tourists never come to see them. There
is no hotel, for one thing, and ticket agents, even at the railway
stations, look puzzled a moment before they realise where this place
with the twinkling name can hide.... Some consult books. Yet, once you
get there, it is not easy to get away again. Something catches the
feet and ears and eyes. People have been known to go with all their
luggage on Gygi's handcart to the station--then turn aside at the last
moment, caught back by the purple woods.
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