invited her to revisit her native place, and her pride prevented her from making first advances. She had been cut off by her father, the family had kept aloof from her, and this had rankled in her heart. True, Elijah's father and mother were dead, and he was not mixed up in the first contentions; but he had inherited money which she considered ought to have fallen to her.
She was, however, anxious to see the old place again. Her young life there had not been happy; quite the reverse, for her father had been brutal, and her mother Calvinistic and sour. Yet Red Hall was, after all, her old home; its marshes were the first landscape on which her eyes had opened, its daisies had made her first necklaces, its bulrushes her first whips, its sea-wall the boundary of her childish world. It was a yearning for a wider, less level world, which had driven her in a rash moment into the arms of Moses De Witt.
The tide was out, so Mrs. De Witt was obliged to land at the point near the windmill. She walked thence on the sea-wall. She knew that wall well, fragrant with sovereign wood in summer, and rank with sea spinach. The aster blooming time was past, and the violet petals had fallen off, leaving only the yellow centres.
There, before her, like a stranded ark, was the old red house, unaltered, lonely, without a bush or tree to screen it.
The cattle stood browsing in the pasture as of old. In the marsh was a pond, a flight of wild fowl was wheeling round it, as in the autumns long ago. There was the little creek where her punt had lain, the punt in which she had been sometimes sent to Mersea to buy groceries for her mother.
The hard crust about the heart of Mrs. De Witt began to break, and the warm feeling within to ooze through. Gentler sentiments began to prevail. She would not take her son by the ears and bang his head, if she should find him at Red Hall. She would forgive him in a Christian spirit, and grant his dismissal with an innocuous curse.
She walked straight into the house. Elijah was crouched in his leather chair, with his head on one side, asleep. She stood over him and contemplated his unattractive face in silence, till he suddenly started, and exclaimed, "Who is here? Who is this?"
