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Old Gervase watched October come with a sinking heart. It was not that he felt sorry to see his daughters go, but he knew that youth was going—going like summer from the house. When Henny and Madge were married as well as Bess, then Bride and Ann would be mostly away too, for they would always be staying with one sister or another. No one would be in the house save those with their lives behind them, those who, like the woods, looked back on summer, but unlike the woods could not look forward to another spring.

His daughters, foolish, ignorant, noisy girls, had all that quality of youth which seemed as necessary to him now as Charles's kindness of heart, or Louise's elegance of mind. It was new for him to feel this hunger for spring-time. He wondered what had come over him. Was it only that his girls were leaving him, that the house would at last be quiet, that conversation at table would be rational, that he would no longer be put to shame by bad manners and barbarous talk, nor hear screechings and hullooings for ever under his windows? . . . Or was there something in him that was new—something old that was new? . . . Looking up to the boughs of oak and sallow and wild cherry lacing their colours over the lane, he saw himself touched like the trees, he felt the hand of winter upon him, though less tenderly than on the trees. In him were no soft burnishings, no glowing, mingling colours of decadence. Man was not as the trees in his decay. He did not go down glowing, but groaning, into his grave. And yet religion and the Scriptures said that in his body, even as in the bodies of the trees, were the new buds and promises of another life, the signs of another spring.