"Just the same old place," murmured Truesdale, as he writhed out of his
cramped quarters and stood on the carriage-block in the dusk to stretch
his legs. "Wonderful how we contrive to stand stock-still in the midst of
all this stir and change!"
II
It was at Vevey, one morning late in August, that Truesdale Marshall
received the letter which turned his face homeward--the summons which
made it seem obligatory for him to report at headquarters, as he phrased
it, without too great a delay. He was pacing along the terrace which
bounded the pension garden lakeward, and his eye wandered back and forth
between the superscription of the envelope and the distant mountain-shore
of Savoy, as it appeared through the tantalizing line of clipped acacias
which bordered the roadway that ran below him.
"'Richard T. Marshall, Esq.,'" he read, slowly, with his eye on the
accumulation of post-marks and renewed addresses. "They keep it up right
along, don't they? I can't make them feel that initials on an envelope
are not the best form. I can't bring them to see that 'Esq.' on foreign
letters is worse than a superfluity." He referred once more to the
mountains of Savoy; they seemed to offer no loophole of escape. "Well,
I've got to do it, I suppose."
He made some brief calculations, and found that he could put himself in
marching order within a month or so. There was the trunk stored at
Geneva; there was that roomful of furniture at Freiburg--Freiburg-im-
Breisgau; there was that brace of paintings boxed up in Florence; and
there were the frayed and loosely flying ends of many miscellaneous
friendships.
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