the town never had
been heard of out there. It (the road) went wandering lazily through the
corn-fields, down by the river, into the very depths of the woods,--the
low October sunshine slanting warmly down it all the way, touching the
grass-banks and the corn-fields with patches of russet gold. Nobody in
such a road could be in a hurry. The quiet was so deep, the free air,
the heavy trees, the sunshine, all so full and certain and fixed, one
could be sure of finding them the same a hundred years from now. Nobody
ever was in a hurry. The brown bees came along there, when their work
was over, and hummed into the great purple thistles on the roadside in a
voluptuous stupor of delight. The cows sauntered through the clover
by the fences, until they wound up by lying down in it and sleeping
outright. The country-people, jogging along to the mill, walked their
fat old nags through the stillness and warmth so slowly that even
Margaret left them far behind. As the road went deeper into the hills,
the solitude and quiet grew even more penetrating and certain,--so
certain in these grand old mountains that one called them eternal, and,
looking up to the peaks fixed in the clear blue, grew surer of a world
beyond this where there is neither change nor death.

It was growing late; the evening air grew more motionless and cool;
the russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now; in the
valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment. Margaret
turned from the road and went down the fields. One did not wonder,
feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps of meadow, that this
woman, coming down from among them, should be strangely still, with dark
questioning eyes dumb to their own secrets.

Looking into her face now, you could be sure of one thing: that she had
left the town, the factory, the dust far away, shaken the thought of
them off her brain. No miles could measure the distance between her
home and them. At a stile across the field an old man sat waiting. She
hurried now, her cheek coloring. Dr. Knowles could see them going to the
house beyond, talking earnestly. He sat down in the darkening twilight
on the stile, and waited half an hour. He did not care to hear the story
of Margaret's first day at the mill, knowing how her father and mother
would writhe under it, soften it as she would. It was nothing to her,
he knew. So he waited. After a while he heard the old man's laugh, like
that of a pleased