Davy

"He sat down on the edge of the bridge, his legs dangling towards the silver-glinting water. All these thoughts and memories, so long in the telling, had, in fact, crowded through his mind with incredible swiftness. And even as he remembered his childhood, what was really filling his mind was Davy, Davy so loved, so dear, and now a sixmonth dead. It was she--she alone--that had brought him back to Glenmerle in the night, the girl he had loved here, the girl he had married and continued to love for a decade and a half until that winter dawn when she had blindly touched his face a last time and died with her hand in his. Since then grief, the immensity of loss, had filled his life. And yet, amidst the tears and the pain, there was a curious hint of consolation in one thought: the thought that nothing now could mar the years of their love."

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, Prologue

Glenmerle

"Glenmerle, he thought, had been a place to come home to, home from Kentucky or Florida or England, home from schools and home from college. He pictured coming home from boarding school, perhaps for the Christmas holidays, perhaps with snow all about--the woods full of snow. It would be a winter dusk with the big blue spruce a-twinkle with tiny white lights like stars, the big car sweeping up the hill to the house. Then his mother's cries of welcome and her kiss, his father's handshake, and his brother grinning in the background. And of course, as always, the cheery fire in the drawing-room, and through the french doors the dining-room alight with preparations. Upstairs, waiting, would be his own room, just as he had left it. Heaven itself, he thought, would be--must be--a coming home." A Severe Mercy, Prologue