nickers of sunlight
through the gaps of its fireplace. He called himself ill names for
remaining where he was, and made a crazy picture of a photographic car
seesawing along the country roads, with a figure he well knew sitting on
the platform beside him as he drove. It was so absurd, but he quoted
Mrs. Dalles's song of "Brave Love" while he etched:

We could not want for long,
While my man had his violin
And I my sweet love-song.

The world has aye gone well with us,
Old man, since we were one:
Our homeless wanderings down the lanes,
They long ago were done.

Then, across some chasm of indefinite time, he saw a studio and himself
happy at an easel, with this devoted dark face resting against his side,
reciting her work to him and quivering with joy at some sign of success.
But the whole panorama dissolved at a breath.

"Now, aren't you a nice fellow," he addressed himself, "a brilliant
rascal, a wise genius, to be thinking of such a thing?"

Miss Gill was returning from the woods with a full basket before the
morning heat came on. A few women at the storekeeper's fence looked
sidewise at each other as she paused to chat under the photographer's
window.

The morning was so clear that every object stood in startling relief. A
plume of steam far up the leafy railroad vista heralded the Peru
express's lightning passage through the town. Scarcely a lounger was
left on the platform. Mallston had a job of cleaning the cellar for the
storekeeper, and at intervals appeared from its gaping doors with a
basket of decayed potatoes on his shoulders. The landscape rung with
bird-songs, and the girl, who had skimmed the cream off such a morning,
looked up and laughed at her dejected friend. She had purple violets
tucked into her coil of hair, her belt and under her collar.

"What are you doing here? Why aren't you out trying to catch the effect
of day-twilight in the thick woods?"

"I've been trying," he replied without smiling, "to catch the effect of
a rash action--and a woman's face."

"How solemn! Let me see it. Is it Mrs. Stillman's?"

"No, it isn't: it's my wife's."

Her half-lifted hand dropped. While her eyes met his without blenching
she turned ghastly white, her face seeming to wither into sudden age.

The express-train whistled. Only a moment before its steam-plume had
been her symbol of rushing success in life, and now, for some scarcely
apprehended reason, she felt that