She had gone there to take a look, for the first time in months. The present owner, the old and infirm Miss Lorburn, sat in her house in Stuyvesant Square and fretted about her inability to keep an eye on the place; she always said what a pity it was that poor Tom hadn't left it to poor Halo instead of to her. Miss Lorburn's world was peopled with friends and relatives who seemed to her best described by the epithet "poor"; what with one thing or another, she thought them all objects of pity. It was only of herself, old, heavy, with blurred eyes, joints knotted by rheumatism, legs bloated by varicose veins, and her good ear beginning to go, that she never spoke with compassion. She merely said it was a pity poor Halo would have to wait so long for the Willows … not that it would be much use to the poor child when she did get it, if the value of property at Paul's Landing continued to decline at its present rate.

Since Mrs. Tracy's departure for California the Willows, for the first time, had been entrusted to hands unconnected with its past, and as Miss Lorburn feared the new caretakers might not treat poor Elinor's possessions with proper reverence it behoved Halo to see that everything was in order.

As she walked along the drive she was assailed by memories so remote that she felt like an old woman—as old as the Elinor Lorburn of the portrait above the mantel or the purblind cripple in Stuyvesant Square. "I almost wonder I'm not on crutches," she mused; so heavily did the weight of the past hang on her feet and her mind.

The place wore its old look of having waited there quietly for her, with a sort of brooding certainty of her return—not changing, not impatient, not discouraged, but just standing there, house, turf, and trees, the house yearly losing more of its paint, the wistaria adding more clusters to the thousands mercifully veiling the angles and brackets it had been meant to adorn. As she looked about her she understood for the first time how, in what seemed the grotesqueness of discarded fashion, Vance's impatient genius had caught the poetry of the past. For him the place had symbolized continuity, that great nutritive element of which no one had ever told him, of which neither Art nor Nature had been able to speak to him, since nothing in his training had prepared him for their teaching. Yet, blind puppy, groping embryo as he was, he had plunged instantly into that underlying deep when the Willows had given him a glimpse of it.