want to get out again over that bit of mountain-path that leads to your
citadel before twilight."

"Put me out at the gate, Matt. I want to walk up," I said, and held to it
against his protest. I finally made him see that I really was not equal to
another "rocking" over the road, and I stood and watched him drive the huge
car away from me down the Riverfield ribbon.

"I'm afraid I love him and just don't know it," I said to myself, as I
stood at the big gate and watched him going away from me into life as I had
known it since birth until twenty-four hours past. And from that vision of
my past I turned in the sunset light of the present and began to walk
slowly up the long avenue into my future. "I've never known anything but
dancing and motoring and being happy, and how could that teach any woman
what love is?" I queried as I stopped and picked up a small yellow flower
out of a nest of green leaves that some sort of ancestral influence must
have introduced to me as dandelion, for I had never really met one before.
I felt a pale reflection of the glow I had experienced when I took the two
warm pearls in my hands in the morning.

Then suddenly something happened that thrilled me first with interest and
then with--I don't know what to call it, but it was not fear. A fierce
little wind, that was earthy and sweet, but strong, ruffled across my path
and up into the tops of the elms, and with a bit of fury tore down an old
bird's-nest and flung it at my feet. It was soft and downy with bits of fur
and hair and wool inside, but it was all rent in two.

"I wonder if I can hold my Elmnest steady on the limb when--" I was saying
to myself unsteadily, with a mist in my eyes for the small wrecked home,
when from somewhere over my left shoulder there came Pan's reedy call, and