Once and Now

It was the place to leave the train and take the fly to Helstone.
And now sharper feelings came shooting through her heart, whether
pain or pleasure she could hardly tell. Every mile was redolent
of associations, which she would not have missed for the world,
but each of which made her cry upon 'the days that are no more,'
with ineffable longing. The last time she had passed along this
road was when she had left it with her father and mother--the
day, the season, had been gloomy, and she herself hopeless, but
they were there with her. Now she was alone, an orphan, and they,
strangely, had gone away from her, and vanished from the face of
the earth. It hurt her to see the Helstone road so flooded in the
sun-light, and every turn and every familiar tree so precisely
the same in its summer glory as it had been in former years.
Nature felt no change, and was ever young.

Mr. Bell knew something of what would be passing through her
mind, and wisely and kindly held his tongue. They drove up to the
Lennard Arms; half farm-house, half-inn, standing a little apart
from the road, as much as to say, that the host did not so depend
on the custom of travellers, as to have to court it by any
obtrusiveness; they, rather, must seek him out. The house fronted
the village green; and right before it stood an immemorial
lime-tree benched all round, in some hidden recesses of whose
leafy wealth hung the grim escutcheon of the Lennards. The door
of the inn stood wide open, but there was no hospitable hurry to
receive the travellers. When the landlady did appear--and they
might have abstracted many an article first--she gave them a kind
welcome, almost as if they had been invited guests, and
apologised for her coming having been so delayed, by saying, that
it was hay-time, and the provisions for the men had to be sent
a-field, and she had been too busy packing up the baskets to hear
the noise of wheels over the road, which, since they had left the
highway, ran over soft short turf.