for a little space." How strange if, impossible as it might seem, these
words had come to her--to her--direct from the mind of the Almighty!




CHAPTER VI.


Some days after this Susannah sat alone at the window of the family
room, the long white seam on which she was at work enveloping her knees.

Far off on the horizon the cumulous clouds lay with level under-ridges,
their upper outlines softly heaped in pearly lights and shades of dun
and gray. Beneath them the hilly line of the forest was broken
distinctly against the cloud by the spikes of giant pines. That far
outline was blue, not the turquoise blue of the sky above the clouds,
but the blue that we see on cabbage leaves, or such blue as the
moonlight makes when it falls through a frosted pane--steel blue, so
full of light as to be luminous in itself. From this the nearer contour
of the forest emerged, painted in green, with patches and streaks of
russet; the nearer groves were beginning to change colour, and, vivid in
the sunlight, the fields were yellow. From the top of a low hill which
met the sky came the white road winding over rise and hollow till it
passed the door. Who has not felt the invitation, silent, persistent,
of a road that leads through a lonely land to the unseen beyond the
hill?

Susannah was again alone in the house; this time Ephraim was absent with
his mother, and her uncle was at the mill. On the white road she saw a