The old horse jogged them through Paul's Landing, a long crooked sort of town on a high ridge, with gardens full of big trees, and turfy banks sloping down from rambling shabby-looking houses. Now and then a narrower street dipped downhill to their left, and Vance caught a glimpse of lustrous gray waters spreading lakelike to distant hills. "The Hudson," Upton said, flicking his stump of a whip; and at the moment the name stirred Vance more than the sight of the outspread waters. They drove on down a long street between shops, garages, business buildings, all more or less paintless and dilapidated, with sagging awnings lowered against the premature spring heat; then uphill along a rutty lane between trees and small frame houses even shabbier than the others, though some had pretty flowers before them, and lilacs and syringas blooming more richly than Grandma Scrimser's.

"This is it," said Upton, in a voice still shyer and more apologetic. "It" was a small wooden house, painted dark brown, with the paint peeling off, and a broken-down trellis arbour in a corner of the front yard. There were shade trees over the house, and a straggling rose on the verandah; but the impression made by the whole place was of something neglected and dingy, something left in a backwater, like the sad Delaney house from which Vance still averted his thoughts.

"You seem to have lots of trees around everywhere," he remarked to Upton, wishing he could think of something more striking to say.

"Aren't there as many out your way?" Upton rejoined.

"I dunno," Vance mumbled, suddenly on his guard against admitting any inferiority in Euphoria, even to the amount of shade afforded by its trees. "I suppose they're just different—the way everything else is," he added.

Mrs. Tracy, who now appeared on the doorstep, was certainly different—not only from the gay bride in showy pink who had dazzled her western relatives on her wedding tour, but also from any of the women of Vance's family. She was small and slight, like Mrs. Weston, but without the latter's sharpness of outline and incisiveness of manner. There was something fluctuant and shadowy about Mrs. Tracy, as there was about her overshaded dooryard; but she had a kind of phantom prettiness, something seen through a veil not so much of years as of failure. She looked, not careless of her beauty, like Grandma Scrimser, but disheartened about it, as Vance suspected she was about everything else in life. But the sweetness of her smile of welcome was something his own mother could not have compassed. "I guess it'll be all right here," Vance thought, his contracted nerves relaxing.

"You look very tired; the journey must have been awful. Come right in and have some supper," Mrs. Tracy said, slipping her arm through his.