etty air of decision, lest the invitation to walk
should be renewed. "Stay where you are, and I'll fetch a stool. It's
quite a treat to see you looking lazy for once in a way."

She brought a stool and established herself close to him. He
acknowledged her presence without removing his eyes from the
storm-tossed glory of the sky.

"Look, Ladybird--look!" he urged in a low tone. "We can talk
afterwards."

But her attention was caught and riveted by the reflection of the
glory in her husband's face.

"Does it please you so tremendously?" she asked in honest
bewilderment. "Just a sunset! You've seen hundreds of them before."

He smiled and answered nothing. Speech and emotion inhabit different
hemispheres of a man's brain; woman alone is rash enough to force them
into unwilling union.

The clinging garment of mist, driven and dispersed by day's last flash
of self-assertion, lay heaped and tumbled in the valleys, and the
mountains stood knee-deep in an opalescent sea of foam. It was as
though Nature, in a mood of capricious kindliness, had rent the veil,
that mortals might share in the triumphal passing of the sun, whose
supremacy had been in eclipse these many days.

Above the deep-toned quiet of earth, blurred and ragged clouds showed
every conceivable tone of umber and grey, from purest pearl-white to
darkest depths of indigo. Only low down, where a blue-black mass ended
with level abruptness, a flaming strip of day was splashed along the
west--one broad brush-stroke, as it were, by some Titanic artist whose
palette held liquid fire. Snows and mist alike caught and flung back
the radiance in a maze of rainbow hues; while beyond the bank of
cloud a vast pale fan of light shot outward and upward to the very
zenith of heaven. Each passing minute wrought some imperceptible
change of grouping, form, or colour; blurred masses melted to flakes
and strata on a groundwork of frail blue; orange deepened to crimson;
and anon earth and sky were on fire with tints of garnet and rose.
Each several snow-peak blushed like an angel surprised in a good deed.
Splashes of colour sprang from cloud-tip to cloud-tip with invisible
speed, till even the chill east glowed with a faint hue of life.

And in the midst of the transient splendour, enveloped by the
isolation of the falling day, husband and wife sat silent, absorbed in
strangely opposite reflections. Verily they dwelt in different
planets, these two who had willed to be one, bu