cousin down at Souris was dead. Mother, if the Master don't want
any more tea, ain't there some cream for Timothy?"



CHAPTER V. A PHANTOM OF DELIGHT

Shortly before sunset that evening Eric went for a walk. When he
did not go to the shore he liked to indulge in long tramps
through the Lindsay fields and woods, in the mellowness of "the
sweet 'o the year." Most of the Lindsay houses were built along
the main road, which ran parallel to the shore, or about the
stores at "The Corner." The farms ran back from them into
solitudes of woods and pasture lands.

Eric struck southwest from the Williamson homestead, in a
direction he had not hitherto explored, and walked briskly along,
enjoying the witchery of the season all about him in earth and
air and sky. He felt it and loved it and yielded to it, as
anyone of clean life and sane pulses must do.

The spruce wood in which he presently found himself was smitten
through with arrows of ruby light from the setting sun. He went
through it, walking up a long, purple aisle where the wood-floor
was brown and elastic under his feet, and came out beyond it on a
scene which surprised him.

No house was in sight, but he found himself looking into an
orchard; an old orchard, evidently long neglected and forsaken.
But an orchard dies hard; and this one, which must have been a