She had gone down to the small oval sitting-room commanding the
driveway, thinking it probable that Drusilla Fane might come to see her.
Watching for her approach, she threw open the French window set in the
rounded end of the room and leading out to the Corinthian-columned
portico that adorned what had once been the garden side of the house.
There was no garden now, only a stretch of elm-shaded lawn, with a few
dahlias and zinnias making gorgeous clusters against the already
gorgeous autumn-tinted shrubbery. On the wall of a neighboring brick
house, Virginia creeper and ampelopsis added fuel to the fire of
surrounding color, while a maple in the middle distance blazed with all
the hues that might have flamed in Moses's burning bush. It was one of
those days of the American autumn when the air is shot with gold, when
there is gold in the light, gold on the foliage, gold on the grass, gold
on all surfaces, gold in all shadows, and a gold sheen in the sky
itself. Red gold like a rich lacquer overlay the trunks of the
occasional pines, and pale-yellow gold, beaten and thin, shimmered along
the pendulous garlands of the American elms, where they caught the sun.
It was a windless morning and a silent one; the sound of a hammer or of
a motorist's horn, coming up from the slope of splendid woodland that
was really the town, accentuated rather than disturbed the immediate
stillness.

To Olivia Guion this quiet ecstasy of nature was uplifting. Its rich,
rejoicing quality restored as by a tonic her habitual confidence in her
ability to carry the strongholds of life with a high and graceful hand.
Difficulties that had been paramount, overpowering, fell all at once
into perspective, becoming heights to be scaled rather than barriers
defying passage. For the first time in the twenty-four hours since the
previous morning's revelations, she thought of her lover as bringing