Hawkins had slumped back in his seat, so that his head rested upon the hood, and had fallen sound asleep, with his mouth wide open.

How I wished that I had the courage to strangle him--and then it came to me that, after all, it was not he who had ruined me, but I who had ruined him! About noontime we came to a landscape that seemed familiar to me, although more heavily wooded and with many more farms than I remembered; and at a turn in the road I recognized a couple of huge elms that marked the site of the homestead occupied in my boyhood by the Quirks.

There was the brook, the maple grove upon the hill, the old stile by the pasture, and the long stone wall beside the apple orchard, radiant with white.

Yet the house seemed to have vanished.

My heart sank, for somehow I had assumed that the Quirks must still be living, just as they had always lived.