mists that the cold air encourages were rolling
in chill and heavy from the river and leveling the hollow places in the
land. The clouds were still a claret colored purple in the west, but in
another few minutes that color would be gone. The shapes around us were
fast losing their distinctiveness, and their outlines were becoming more
and more a matter for the memory, and not the eye. And it seems to me
that I never knew the air to seem more fresh and sweet.

We had broken into a sharp gallop down the rutted lane. The house, gaunt
and spectral, and bleaker and more forbidding than the darkening sky,
was behind us, and ahead were the broad level meadows, checkered with
little clumps of willow and cedars, as meadows are that lie near the
salt marshes. I had feared we might be intercepted at our gate, but I
was mistaken. We had swerved to the left and were thudding down the
level road, when an exclamation from Mademoiselle made me turn in my
saddle. My look must have been a somewhat blank interrogation, for
Mademoiselle was laughing.

"To think," she cried, "I should have said you resembled your mother!
Where are we going, Monsieur?"

But I think she knew without my answering, for she laughed again, and I
did not entirely blame her. It was pleasant enough to leave our house
behind. It was pleasant to feel the bite of the salt wind, and to see the
trees and the rocks by the roadside slip past us, gaunt and spectral in
the evening. I knew the road well enough, which was fortunate, even when
we turned off the beaten track over a trail which was hardly as good as a
foot path. I was forced to reduce our pace to a walk, but I was confident
that it did not make much difference. Once on the path, the farm was not
half a mile distant, just behind a ridge of rocks that was studded by a
stunted undergrowth of wind beaten oak. I knew the place. I could already
picture the gaping black windows, the broken, sagging ridge pole, and the
crumbling chimney. For years the wind had blown sighing through its
deserted rooms, while the rain rotted the planking. It was not strange
that its owners had left it, for I can imagine no more mournful or
desolate spot. Our own house, three miles away, was its nearest neighbor,
and scarcely a congenial one. Around it was nothing but rain sogged
meadows that scarcely rose above the salt marshes that ran to the dunes
where the Atlantic was beating.

As I stared grimly ahead, I could picture her there beh