Robert Turner 's Revenge When Robert Turner came to the green , ferny triangle where the station road forked to the right and left under the birches , he hesitated as to which direction he would take . The left led out to the old Turner homestead , where he had spent his boyhood and where his cousin still lived ; the right led down to the Cove shore where the Jameson property was situated . Since he had stopped off at Chiswick for the purpose of looking this property over before foreclosing the mortgage on it he concluded that he might as well take the Cove road ; he could go around by the shore afterward -- he had not forgotten the way even in forty years -- and so on up through the old spruce wood in Alec Martin 's field -- if the spruces were there still and the field still Alec Martin 's -- to his cousin 's place . He would just about have time to make the round before the early country supper hour . 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 XXXXX forty years ago had been neither cold nor hard nor selfish .
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