herself in a new country, wherein he who had led her there was least able
to be her guide. There were moments when she felt that the first stranger
in the street could have interpreted her happiness for her more easily
than Denis. Then, as her eye adapted itself, as the lines flowed into each
other, opening deep vistas upon new horizons, she began to enter into
possession of her kingdom, to entertain the actual sense of its belonging
to her. But she had never before felt that she also belonged to it; and
this was the feeling which now came to complete her happiness, to give it
the hallowing sense of permanence.

She rose from the writing-table where, list in hand, she had been going
over the wedding-invitations, and walked toward the drawing-room window.
Everything about her seemed to contribute to that rare harmony of feeling
which levied a tax on every sense. The large coolness of the room, its fine
traditional air of spacious living, its outlook over field and woodland
toward the lake lying under the silver bloom of September; the very scent
of the late violets in a glass on the writing-table; the rosy-mauve masses
of hydrangea in tubs along the terrace; the fall, now and then, of a leaf
through the still air--all, somehow, were mingled in the suffusion of
well-being that yet made them seem but so much dross upon its current.

The girl's smile prolonged itself at the sight of a figure approaching from
the lower slopes above the lake. The path was a short cut from the Peyton
place, and she had known that Denis would appear in it at about that hour.
Her smile, however, was prolonged not so much by his approach as by her
sense of the impossibility of communicating her mood to him. The feeling
did not disturb her. She could not imagine sharing her deepest moods with
any one, and the world in which she lived with Denis was too bright and
spacious to admit of any sense of constraint. Her smile was in truth a
tribute to that clear-eyed directness of his which was so often a refuge