coming. At the door she did look at him. He was shocked at
the drooping sadness of her face. Yet she was smiling.

"Don't bother, Peter," she said. "You've done nothing wrong, nothing
whatever."

Then she went up the stairs, and Peter, after watching the last glimmer
of her dress, strode away into the orchard and threw himself on the
grass. Thoughts not formulated, emotions one yeast of unrest went
surging through him, until he felt himself a riot of forces he could not
control. It was youth that moved him, his own ungoverned youth, but it
seemed to him life, and that all life was like it. Peter thought he had
experienced enormously because he had lived in Paris and painted
pictures. Yet he had never governed his course of being. It had been
done for him. The greatest impression it had made on him thus far was of
the extreme richness of things. There was so much of everything! He was
young. There was a great deal of time, and if he did not paint his
pictures this year, he could do it next. There were infinite
possibilities. He had ease and talent and power. He had, even so far,
won laurels enough to be a little careless of them. Since he had by the
happy pains of art got so much out of life, he made no doubt that by
superlative efforts, which he meant to make in that divine future where
the sun was always shining, he should set all the rivers afire. There
was money enough, too. He had never lacked it, thanks to old Osmond's
thrift, Osmond who did not need it himself in the ordinary ways of man.
He found such pure fun in the pleasures money bought that there was a
separate luxury in giving it up, turning it in to the sum of things, and
living straitly that labor might take some ease.

And here he lay on the grass, youth seething within him and pointing
like a drunken guide, a vine-crowned reveler, to a myriad paths, all
wonderful. His mind wandered to Rose and settled there in a delighted
acquiescence. He had never before given himself wholly up to her spell,
but now, whether the summer day beguiled him, or whether her mysterious
trouble moved him, he thought of her until they seemed to be alone
together on the earth,--and that was happiness. Beauty! that was what
she meant to him, he told himself when thought was at last uppermost,
and not mere passionate feeling. She was delight and harmony, and
allegiance to her was like worship of the world.

When he got out of his dream and went in to dinner with the noon sun
u