t it short and marry her as soon as he
could get things together. Then his thoughts wandered away to some
other of his personal matters; and while Leam was living over the
day hour by hour, word by word, he had settled the terms for Farmer
Mason's new lease, had decided to rebuild the north lodge, which was
ugly and incommodious; and on this, something catching the end of that
inexplicable association of ideas, he wondered how some one whom he
had left in India was going on, and what had become of Violet Cray.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

IN LETTERS OF FIRE.

THE storm which had threatened to break last night still held off,
but the spirit of the weather had changed. It was no longer bright and
clear, but sunless, airless, heated, silent--the stillness which seems
to presage as much sorrow to man as it heralds tumult to Nature. Leam,
however--interpenetrated by her love, which gave what it felt and
saw what it brought--always remembered this early day as the ideal of
peace and softness, where was no prophecy of coming evil, no shadow of
the avenging hand stretched out to punish and destroy--only peace and
softness, love, joy and rest.

The gray background of the heavy sky, which to others was heavy and
gloomy, was to her the loveliest expression of repose, and the absence
of sunlight was as grateful as a veil drawn against the glare. If
not beautiful in itself, it added beauty to other things: witness
the passionate splendor given by it to the flowers, which seemed
by contrast to gain a force and vitality of color, a richness and
significance, they never had before. She specially remembered in days
to come a bed of scarlet poppies that glowed like so many cups of
flame against the dark masses of evergreens behind them; and the
scarlet geraniums, the bold bosses of the blood-red peonies, the fiery
spathes of salvia and gladiolus the low-lying verbenas like rubies
cast on the green leaves and brown earth, the red gold, flame-color
streaked with lines of blood, of the nasturtiums festooning the
bordering wires of the centre beds, all seemed to come out like spires
of flame or rosettes dyed in blood, till the garden was filled with
only those two colors--the one of fire and the other of blood.

But though Leam remembered this in after-days as the weird prophecy
of what was to come, at the time those burning beds of flowers
simply pleased her with their brilliant coloring; and she sat in her
accustomed place on the garden-