When he took her hand to assist her to rise he felt it tremble in his own.

"It was not a pleasant story," he said. "I ought not to have told it to you."

They scarcely spoke at all as they descended. He did not understand his own unreasoning happiness. What reason was there for it, after all? If he had argued the matter, he was in the mood to have said that what he gained in the strange sweetness of the flying moments could only hurt himself, and was enough in itself to repay him for any sense of pain and loss which might follow. But he did not argue at all. In Laurence Arbuthnot\'s place he would scarcely have given himself the latitude he was giving himself now.

"It is safe enough for me," was the sharp-edged thought which had cut through all others once or twice. "It is safe enough for me to be as happy as I may."

But he forgot this as they went down the hill, side by side. For the time being he only felt, and each glance he turned upon Bertha\'s downcast face gave him cause to realize, what intensity his feelings had reached, and wakened him to that sudden starting of pulse and heart which is almost a pain. When they reached the house Bertha went in search of Janey. She remained with her for about half an hour, and then came out to the hammock with her work-basket. The carnations at her waist were crushed a little, and something of the first freshness of her holiday air was gone. She held a letter in her hand, which she had evidently been reading. She had not returned it to its envelope, and it was still half open.

"It is from Richard," she said, after she had taken[Pg 209] her seat in the hammock. "It was brought in from the post-office at Lowville about an hour ago."

"From Richard?" he said. "He is coming home, I suppose."

"No," she answered, looking down at the closely written sheets,—"he is not coming yet. He was wise enough not to take a serious view of Janey\'s case. He is very encouraging, and expresses his usual confidence in my management."

There was nothing like bitterness in her voice, and it struck him that he had never seen so little expression of any kind in her face. She opened the letter and looked over the first page of it.

"He has a great many interesting things to say," she went on; "and he is very enthusiastic."

"About what?" Tredennis asked. She looked up.

"About the Westoria lands," she answered. "He finds all sorts of complications of good fortune connected with them. I don\'t understand them all, by any means. I am not good at business. But it seems as though the persons who own the Westoria lands will be able to command the resources of the entire surrounding country,—if the railroad is carried through; of course it all depends upon the railroad."

"And the railroad," suggested Tredennis, "depends upon"—

"I don\'t know," she replied. "On several people, I suppose. I wish it depended on me."

"Why?" said Tredennis.

She smiled slightly and rather languidly.

"I should like to feel that anything so important depended on me," she said. "I should like the sense of power. I am very fond of power."

"I once heard it said that you had a great deal of it," Tredennis said; "far more than most women."

She smiled again, a trifle less languidly.

"That is Laurence Arbuthnot," she observed. "I always recognize his remarks when I hear them. He[Pg 210] did not mean a compliment exactly, either, though it sounds rather like one. He has a theory that I affect people strongly, and he chooses to call that power. But it is too trivial. It is only a matter of pleasing or displeasing, and I am obliged to exert myself. It does not enable me to bestow things, and be a potentate. I think that to be a potentate might console one for a great many things,—and for the lack of a great many. If you can\'t take, it must distract your attention to be able to give."

"I do not like to hear you speak as if the chief thing to be desired was the ability to distract one\'s self," Tredennis said.

She paused a second.

"Then," she said, "I will not speak so now. To-day I will do nothing you do not like." Then she added, "As it is your last day, I wish to retrieve myself."

"What have you to retrieve?" he asked.

"Myself," she answered, "as I said."

She spread the letter upon her lap, and gave her attention to it.

"Isn\'t it rather like Richard," she said, "that, when he begins to write, he invariably writes a letter like that? Theoretically he detests correspondence, but when he once begins, his letter always interests him, and even awakens him to a kind of enthusiasm, so that instead of being brief he tells one everything. He has written twelve pages here, and it is all delightful."

"That is a wonderful thing to do," remarked Tredennis; "but it does not surprise me in Richard."

"No," she replied, "Richard can always interest himself; or, rather, he does not interest himself,—it is that he is interested without making an effort; that is his strong point."

She replaced the letter in the envelope and laid it in the basket, from which she took a strip of lace-work, beginning to employ herself with it in a manner more suggestive of graceful leisure than of industrious [Pg 211]intention. It seemed to accentuate the fact that they had nothing to do but let the day drift by in luxurious idleness.

But Tredennis could not help seeing that for a while the tone of her mood, so to speak, was lowered. And yet, curiously enough, nothing of his own dreamy exaltation died away. The subtle shadow which seemed to have touched her, for a moment, only intensified his feeling of tenderness. In fact there were few things which would not have so intensified it; his mental condition was one which must advance by steady, silent steps of development to its climax. He was not by nature a reckless man, but he was by no means unconscious that there was something very like recklessness in his humor this last day.

As for the day itself, it also advanced by steady steps to its climax, unfolding its beauties like a perfect flower. The fresh, rain-washed morning drifted into a warm, languorous noon, followed by an afternoon so long and golden that it seemed to hold within itself the flower and sun, shade and perfume, of a whole summer. Tredennis had never known so long an afternoon, he thought, and yet it was only lengthened by the strange delight each hour brought with it, and was all too short when it was over. It seemed full of minute details, which presented themselves to his mind at the time as discoveries. Bertha worked upon her lace, and he watched her, waiting for the moment when she would look up at him, and then look down again with a quick or slow droop of the lids, which impressed itself upon him as a charm in itself. There was a little ring she wore which made itself a memory to him,—a simple turquoise, which set upon the whiteness of her hand like a blue flower. He saw, with a new sense of recognition, every fold and line of her thin, white drapery, the slight, girlish roundness of her figure, the dashes of brightness in the color of her hair, the smallness of the gold thimble on her finger, her grace when she rose or[Pg 212] sat down, or rested a little against the red cushions in her hammock, touching the ground now and then with her slender slipper and swaying lightly to and fro.

"Do you know," he said to her once, as he watched her do this, "do you know,"—with absorbed hesitation,—"that I feel as if—as if I had never really seen you until to-day—until this afternoon. You seem somehow to look different."

"I am not sure," she answered, "that I have ever seen you before; but it is not because you look different."

"Why is it?" he asked, quite ready to relinquish any idea of his own in the pursuit of one of hers.

She looked down a moment.

"To-day," she said, "I don\'t think you have anything against me."

"You think," he returned, "that I have usually something against you?"

"Yes," she answered.

"Will you tell me what you think it is?"

"I do not need to tell you," she said. "You know so well—and it would rather hurt me to put it into words."

"Hurt you?" he repeated.

"I should be harder than I am," she returned, "if it had not hurt me to know it myself—though I would not tell you that at any other time than now. I dare say I shall repent it to-morrow," she said.

"No," he answered, "you won\'t repent it. Don\'t repent it."

He felt the vehemence of his speech too late to check it. When he ended she was silent, and it was as if suddenly a light veil had fallen upon her face, and he felt that, too, and tried to be calmer.

"No," he repeated, "you must not repent. It is I who must repent that I have given you even a little pain. It is hard on me to know that I have done that."

The afternoon stretched its golden length to a sunset[Pg 213] which cast deep, velvet shadows upon the grass and filled the air with an enchanted mellow radiance. Everything took a tinge of gold,—the green of the pines and the broad-leaved chestnut trees, the gray and brown of their trunks, the red of the old house, the honeysuckle and Virginia creeper clambering about it, the birds flying homeward to their nests. When the rich clearness and depth of color reached its greatest beauty Bertha folded her strip of lace and laid it in the little basket.

"We ought simply to sit and watch this," she said. "I don\'t think we ought even to speak. It will be all over in a few minutes, and we shall never see it again."

"No," said Tredennis, with a sad prescience; "nor anything at all like it."

"Ah!" was Bertha\'s rejoinder, "to me it has always seemed that it is not the best of such hours that one does see others like them. I have seen the sun set like this before."

"I have not," he said.

As he stood silent in the stillness and glow a faint, rather bitter, smile touched his lips and faded out. He found himself, he fancied, face to face with Laurence Arbuthnot again. He was sharing the sunset with him; there were ten chances against one that he had shared the day with him also.

Bertha sat in the deepening enchanted light with a soft, dreamy look. He thought it meant that she remembered something; but he felt that the memory was one to which she yielded herself without reluctance, or that she was happy in it. At last she lifted her eyes to his, and their expression was very sweet in its entire gentleness and submission to the spell of the moment.

"See!" she said, "the sun has slipped behind the pines already. We have only a few seconds left."

And then, even as they looked at the great fire, made brighter by the dark branches through which they saw it, it sank a little lower, and a little lower, and with an expiring flame was gone.

[Pg 214]

Bert............