George MacDonald

Home Again George MacDonald

In the dusk of the old-fashioned best room of a farm-house, in the faint glow of the buriedsun through the sods of his July grave, sat two elderly persons, dimly visible, breathing theodor which roses unseen sent through the twilight and open window. One of the two wasscarcely conscious of the odor, for she did not believe in roses; she believed mainly inmahogany, linen, and hams; to the other it brought too much sadness to be welcomed, for itseemed, like the sunlight, to issue from the grave of his vanished youth. He was not bynature a sad man; he was only one that had found the past more delightful than thepresent, and had not left his first loves. The twilight of his years had crept upon him and was deepening; and he felt his youthslowly withering under their fallen leaves. With more education, and perhaps morereceptivity than most farmers, he had married a woman he fervently loved, whose rarelytruthful nature, to which she had striven to keep true, had developed the delicate flower ofmoral and social refinement; and her influence upon him had been of the eternal sort. While many of their neighbors were vying with each other in the effort to dress, and dwell, and live up to their notion of gentility, Richard Colman and his wife had never troubledthemselves about fashion, but had sought to please each the taste of the other, and cultivatetheir own. Perhaps now as he sat thus silent in the dimmits, he was holding closer conversethan he knew, or any of us can know, with one who seemed to have vanished from all thisside of things, except the heart of her husband. That clung to what people would call hermemory; I prefer to call it her