dread the coming on of the
cold," said Sylvie. "But the rain came and settled it, for just now.
That rested me. A real good 'can't help' is such a comfort."

"The Father's No. Shutting us in with its grand, gentle forbiddance.
Many a rain-storm is that. I always feel so safe when I am shut up
by really impossible weather."

After the tea, they were still in time for the whole sunset,
wonderful after the storm.

Desire had gone from the table to the half-glazed door which opened
from the room into a broad porch, looking out directly across the
hollow, along a valley-line of side-hills, to the distant blue
peaks.

"O, come!" she cried back to the others, as she hastened out upon
the platform. "It is marvelous!"

Heavy lines of clouds lay banked together in the west, black with
the remnant and recoil of tempest; between these, through rifts and
breaks, poured down the sunlight across bright spaces into the
bosoms of the hills lighting them up with revelations. The sloping
outlines shone golden green with lingering summer color, and
discovered each separate wave and swell of upland. The searching
shafts fell upon every tree and bush and spire, moving slowly over
them and illuminating point after point, making each suddenly seem
distinct and near. What had been a mere margin of distant woods,
stood eliminated and relieved in bough and stem and leafage, with a
singular pre-Raphaelitic individuality. It was the standing-out of
all things in the last radiance; called up, one by one under the
flash of judgment--beautiful, clear, terrible.

Then the clouds themselves, as the sun dropped down, drank in the
splendor. They turned to rose and crimson; they floated, and spread,
and broke, and drifted up the valley, against the hills on right and
left. Rags and shreds of them, trailing gorgeous with color, clung
where the ridges caught them, and streamed like fragments of
heavenly banners. The sky repeated the October woods,--the woods the
sky,--in vivid numberless hues.

The sunset rolled up and around the watchers as they gazed. They
were _in_ it; it lay at their very feet, and beside them at either
hand. Below, the sheet of water in the "Clay-Pits," gleamed like
burnished gold. Here and there, from among the tree-tops, came up
the smoke of little cascades, reaching for baptism into the
pervading glory.

It was chilly, and they had to go in; but they kept coming back to
window and door, looking out through the closed sash