When they had gone away, nearly six months before, those bleak avenues had been leafy arcades, where the birds sang all the bright day long, flowers had bloomed wherever her eye rested, and red roses and sweetbrier had twined themselves around the low windows and stone pillars of the portico.

Now the trees were writhing skeletons, the flowers dead with the summer, nothing left of the roses but rattling brown stalks, and the fish-pond lying under the frowning wintry sky like a sheet of steel.
She went up the stone steps and into the hall, still shivering miserably under her wraps, and saw Grace, and Eeny, and the servants assembled to welcome them, and listened like one in a dream.

It all seemed so flat, and dead, and unsatisfying, and the old time and the old memories were back at her heart, until she almost went wild.

She could see how Eeny and Grace looked a little afraid of her, and how differently they greeted her father; and how heartily and unaffectedly glad he was to be with them once more.

And then she was toiling wearily up the long, wide stairway, followed by faithful Eunice, and had the four walls of her own little sitting room around her at last.
How pretty the room was! A fire burned brightly in the glittering steel grate, the curtains were drawn, for it was already dusk, that short November afternoon; and the ruddy, cheery light sparkled on the pictures, and the book-case, and the inlaid table, and the two little vases of scarlet geraniums Grace had planted there.
Outside, in contrast to all this warmth, and brightness, and comfort, she could hear the lamentable sighing of the wild November wind, and the groaning of the tortured trees.