Then a brief visit with Tom -- Tom had always been a good sort of a fellow although woefully dull and slow-going -- and the evening express for Montreal . He swung with a businesslike stride into the Cove road . As he went on , however , the stride insensibly slackened into an unaccustomed saunter . How well he remembered that old road , although it was forty years since he had last traversed it , a set-lipped boy of fifteen , cast on the world by the indifference of an uncle . The years had made surprisingly little difference in it or in the surrounding scenery . True , the hills and fields and lanes seemed lower and smaller and narrower than he remembered them ; there were some new houses along the road , and the belt of woods along the back of the farms had become thinner in most places . But that was all . He had no difficulty in picking out the old familiar spots . There was the big cherry orchard on the Milligan place which had been so famous in his boyhood . It was snow-white with blossoms , as if the trees were possessed of eternal youth ; they had been in blossom the last time he had seen them . Well , time had not stood still with him as it had with Luke Milligan 's cherry orchard , he reflected grimly . His springtime had long gone by . The few people he met on the road looked at him curiously , for strangers were not commonplace in Chiswick . He recognized some of the older among them but none of them knew him . He had been an awkward , long-limbed lad with fresh boyish colour and crisp black curls when he had left Chiswick . He returned to it a somewhat portly figure of a man , with close-cropped , grizzled hair , and a face that looked as if it might be carved out of granite , so immobile and unyielding it was -- the face of a man who never faltered or wavered , who stuck at nothing that might advance his plans and purposes , a face known and dreaded in the business world where he reigned master . It was a cold , hard , selfish face , but the face of the boy of forty years ago had been neither cold nor hard nor selfish . Presently the homesteads and orchard lands grew fewer and then ceased altogether . The fields were long and low-lying , sloping down to the misty blue rim of sea . A turn of the road brought him in sudden sight of the Cove , and there below him was the old Jameson homestead , built almost within wave-lap of the pebbly shore and shut away into a lonely grey world of its own by the sea and sands and those long slopes of tenantless fields .
He paused at the sagging gate that opened XXXXX the long , deep-rutted lane and , folding his arms on it , looked earnestly and scrutinizingly over the buildings .
As along although among at for into of than that