the Adirondacks, he came away with the
clutch, as if from a hand of ice, at his heart. He had given her his
best and yet he had not penetrated by word or look beneath the unnatural
gentleness which enveloped her like an outer covering. Then his heart
hardened and he felt that he cursed Kemper for the thing which he had
killed.

Back again in the forest, under the green and gold of the leaves, Laura
asked herself why the associations of that last summer failed so
strangely to disturb her as she looked on the familiar road and
mountains? A single year or a whole lifetime ago, it was all one to her
now, and while she wandered along the paths down which she had walked
with Kemper in the most blissful hours of her love, she found herself
almost regretting that she had ceased to suffer--that since her heart
was broken it had lost even the power to throb. In the city she had felt
herself to be a part of the houses and the streets, and as perfectly
indifferent to the passage of life as they; but here with her heart
against Nature's she would have liked to pulsate with the other live
things in the forest. For the first time for months she began as the
days went by, to quicken to an interest in the songs of the birds, or
the sunsets on the mountains, or the springing up of a new flower beside
the doorstep. And as in every rebound of the emotions from extreme
despair, her connection with life came at last through the eye of the
mind rather than through the heart, and the lesson was taught her
neither by Gerty nor by Adams, but through an awakening to the beauty in
the sights and the sounds of the green natural world about her.

Gerty had left her one afternoon, and as the cart drove away she went
out of the house and sat down in the sun upon the roadside which
bordered the edge of the wood. Behind her was the silence of the forest,
and straight ahead the faint purple hills rose against a pale sky above
which the white clouds sailed like birds. For a while she gazed with
blind eyes at the view for the sake of which the spot was chosen, but
the mountains and the sky left her unmoved, and leaning her arm
presently upon the warm earth, she lay looking at a little blue flower
blooming in the sand at her feet. Her shadow stretched beside her in the
road, and it seemed to her that there was as little difference, save in
her consciousness, between her and her shadow, as there was between her
shadow and the flower. Even her love and her d