of interest which
irradiated a delicious excitement over the bare round of living. It was
enough merely to be alive and conscious that some day--to-morrow, next
week, or the next hour, perhaps, she might meet again the look that had
caused this mixture of ecstasy and terror in her heart. The knowledge
that he was in the same town with her, watching the same lights,
thinking the same thoughts, breathing the same fragrance of
honeysuckle--this knowledge was a fact of such tremendous importance
that it dwarfed to insignificance all the proud historic past of
Dinwiddie. Her imagination, seizing upon this bit of actuality, spun
around it the iridescent gossamer web of her fancy. She felt that it was
sufficient happiness just to stand motionless for hours and let this
thought take possession of her. Nothing else mattered as long as this
one thing was blissfully true.

Lights came out softly like stars in the houses beyond the church-tower,
and in the parlour of the rectory a lamp flared up and then burned dimly
under a red shade. Looking through the low window, she could see the
prim set of mahogany and horsehair furniture, with its deep, heavily
carved sofa midway of the opposite wall and the twelve chairs which
custom demanded arranged stiffly at equal distances on the faded
Axminster carpet.

For a moment her gaze rested on the claw-footed mahogany table, bearing
a family Bible and a photograph album bound in morocco; on the engraving
of the "Burial of Latane" between the long windows at the back of the
room; on the cloudy, gilt-framed mirror above the mantel, with the two
standing candelabra reflected in its surface--and all these familiar
objects appeared to her as vividly as if she had not lived with them
from her infancy. A new light had fallen over them, and it seemed to her
that this light released an inner meaning, a hidden soul, even in the
claw-footed table and the threadbare Axminster carpet. Then the door
into the hall opened and her mother entered, wearing the patched black
silk dress which she had bought before the war and had turned and darned
ever since with untiring fingers. Shrinking back into the dusk, Virginia
watched the thin, slightly stooping figure as it stood arrested there in
the subdued glow of the lamplight. She saw the pale oval face, so
transparent that it was like the face of a ghost, the fine brown hair
parted smoothly under the small net cap, the soft faded eyes in their
hollowed and fain