ong level
streaks of transparent light, emerging from an ethereal green to a deep
orange, lay stretched across the heavens, and a faint golden haze rising
from the land seemed to mingle with them, and form one harmonious mass
of coloring. And the air too was different--purer and rarer than the
enervating atmosphere of the drowsy afternoon. Together they stood and
became subject to the subtle charm of their environment. It seemed to
Helen Thurwell then that a change was creeping into her life. Impersonal
thought had attained a new strength and a new sweetness. But at that
time she had no knowledge of what it meant.

"See!" he exclaimed softly, pointly westward, "there is what Coleridge
made dear to us for ever, and Byron vainly scoffed at--the 'green light
that lingers in the west.'"

He repeated the stanza absently, and half to himself, with a sudden
oblivion of her presence--

"It were a vain endeavor,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west.
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within."

She watched him as his voice sank lower and lower, and though his eyes
were dry and bright, she saw a look of intense sadness sweep across his
face. Almost she felt inclined to let her natural sympathy escape
her--to let loose the kind and tender words which had leapt up from her
heart, and even trembled upon her lips. But a rush of consciousness
came, and she choked them back. Thus much she could do, but no more. She
could not at that moment look upon him as the man already suspected in
many quarters of a most brutal murder. For the instant, all was blotted
out. Had she tried she could not at that moment have revived her own
suspicions. They seemed to her like some grotesque fungi of the
mind--poisonous weeds to be crushed and destroyed. But the seed was
there.

"Those are the saddest lines I ever read," she said quietly. "It is a
true ode to dejection."

"And therefore they are very precious," he answered. "It is always sweet
to find your own emotions so exquisitely expressed. It is like a
spiritual narcotic."

"And yet--yet such poems encourage sadness, and that is morbid."

He shook his head.

"To be sad is not necessarily to be unhappy," he answered. "That sounds
like a paradox, but it isn't! You remember the 'gentle melancholy' which
Milton loved. There is something sweet in that, is there not?"

"But it is