The sun was getting low and the sky above the house
was flaming but the trees were sombre and the house was cold.
It did not seem to him to have changed in any way since he had left it. The
windows had always been of a grim hideous glass, the stone shape of the
place always squat and ugly, and the short flight of steps that led up to
the heavy beetling door had always hinted, with their old hard surface, at
a surly welcome and a reluctant courtesy. It was all as it had been.
The sky, now a burning red, looked down upon an utterly deserted garden,
and the silence that was over all the place seemed to rise, like streaming
mist, from the heart of the nettles that grew thick along the crumbling
wall.
The paint had faded from the door and the knocker was rusty; as Peter
hammered his arrival on to the flat silence a bird flew from the black
bunch of trees, whirred into the air and was gone....
For a long time after the echo of his knock had faded away there was
silence, and it seemed to him that this could be only another of those
dreams--those dreams when he had stood on the stone steps in the heart of
the deserted garden and woken the echoes through the empty house. At last
there were steps; some one came along the passage and halted on the other
side of the door and listened. They both waited on either side, and Peter
could hear heavy thick breathing.
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