The Miss Bertrams shuddered at his conversation.

Mrs.Roughsedge found him racy company, and he presented to her aspects of village life and opinion with which the Miss Bertrams were not at all acquainted.
* * * * * As the mother and son approached the old house in the sunset light, its aspect of mellow and intimate congruity with the woods and fields about it had never been more winning.

The red, gray, and orange of its old brickwork played into the brown and purples of its engirdling trees, into the lilacs and golds and crimsons of the western sky behind it, into the cool and quiet tones of the meadows from which it rose.

A spirit of beauty had been at work fusing man's perishable and passing work with Nature's eternal masterpiece; so that the old house had in it something immortal, and the light which played upon it something gently personal, relative, and fleeting.

Winter was still dominant; a northeast wind blew.