here the trees hung out red and yellow, as flags upon a gala day.
He saw the maples on the mountain rise tier above tier, in feathery
scarlet and gold. About his feet the flowering weeds were blowing in one
last desperate effort of riotous bloom. The indigo birds, like flakes
from the sky above, were flitting, calling, everywhere, as they tarried
on their southward journey. Alec walked by the rushing river, almost
dazzled by its glitter, and felt himself to be, not only an unhappy, but
an ill-disposed man.

"And yet--and yet--" thought he, "if Heaven might grant her to me--":
and the heaven above him seemed like brass, and the wish like a prayer
gone mad.

CHAPTER XX.

Sophia had lived on through a few more quiet days; and now she knew that
the problem to which she had set herself was not that one pleasantly
remote from her inmost self, as to where her duty lay in helping on an
ideal social state, but another question, that beside the first seemed
wholly common and vulgar, one that tore from her all glamours of
romantic conception, so that she sat, as it were, in a chamber denuded
of all softness and beauty, face to face with her own pride. And so
lusty was this pride she had deemed half-dead that beside it all her
former enthusiasms seemed to fade into ghostly nothings.

At first she only determined, by all the chivalrous blood that ran in
her veins, to continue her kindness to the Trenholmes. She foresaw a
gust of unpopularity against them, and she saw herself defending their
interests and defying criticism. In this bright prospect the brothers
were humbly grateful and she herself not a little picturesque in
generous patronage. It was a delightful vision--for an hour; but because
she was nearer thirty than twenty it passed quickly. She touched it with
her knowledge of the world and it vanished. No; social life could not be
changed in a day; it would not be well that it should be. Much of the
criticism that would come in this case would be just; and the harsher
blows that would be dealt could not be stayed nor the unkindness defied;
even in the smaller affairs of life, he who would stand by the wronged
must be willing to suffer wrong. Was she ready for that? The longer she
meditated, the more surely she knew that Alec Trenholme loved her. And
when she had meditated a little longer--in spite of the indignation she
had felt at the bare suggestion--she knew that she loved him.

The fine theories of universal