Their steps were
noiseless. The odor of the cedars and the temple-like stillness brought
to Peter's mind the night of his mother's death. It seemed to him a long
time since he had come running through the glade after a doctor, and
yet, by a queer distortion of his sense of time, his mother's death and
burial bulked in his past as if it had occurred yesterday.
There was no sound in the glade to disturb Peter's thoughts except a
murmur of human voices from some of the innumerable privacies of the
place, and the occasional chirp of a waxwing busy over clusters of
cedar-balls.
It had been five weeks and a day since Caroline died. Five weeks and a
day; his mother's death drifting away into the mystery and oblivion of
the past. Likewise, twenty-five years of his own life completed and
gone.
A procession of sad, wistful thoughts trailed through Peter's brain: his
mother, and Ida May, and now Cissie. It seemed to Peter that all any
woman had ever brought him was wistfulness and sadness. His mother had
been jealous, and instead of the great happiness he had expected, his
home life with her had turned out a series of small perplexities and
pains.
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