ard--with
baskets as full as Ted had predicted. Going through the bright-hued
woods, where the scarlet and burnished yellow of long-lived leaves
still flaunted ribbons of flame and the dead and dun-colored broke
crisply beneath their feet, they fell amicably silent, trudging briskly
along with the impetus of health and hunger. Ted's silence was the
content of a body drenched all day in sunshine and clean, cold air, and
now deliciously placid; but Sheila's quiet was of a different quality.
For her the woods were full of mysteries and miracles; she was sure
that little people, as quick and elusive as shadows, darted hither and
thither at her very feet, and that enchantment was spread there like a
fine-spun web. As she walked onward, brooding over things unseen and
yet so surely true for her, there recurred to her a dream of the night
before, and so vivid was her remembrance of it that she seemed to be
dreaming a second time.

In the dream, oddly enough, she had been walking through these same
woods. Here and there she had seen a bright leaf blowing; she had
heard her own footsteps on the brittle leaves beneath; a slender shaft
of sunlight--the last of the day--had stolen downward and touched her
like a long finger. Then, suddenly, the golden finger had withdrawn
and the dusk had fallen, not gradually, but in swift, downward billows
of mist that flooded upon her and blinded her. She had closed her eyes
against them for a moment, and when she opened them again, the mist had
disappeared, leaving her in a space of clear gray light. Through this
light some one had come toward her, a shape at first vague and
ethereal, as if it were a lingering spirit of the mist, but gathering
substance and definite outline as it advanced until it became the
figure of a woman with arms that reached toward her for embrace.
Involuntarily Sheila's own arms had reached forth in answer; she had
taken a stumbling step forward; through the pale light there had
glimmered on her, for an instant of revelation, the shadow's face.

_And she had wakened with the cry: "Mother!"_

A strange dream, especially for a little girl whose mother had died
soon after her birth. But that dead mother had always been a dear
familiar of Sheila's thoughts; her picture had been like a living
companion. And though the sleeping vision of her had driven the child,
startled to the very soul, to her grandmother's bed, now, as she trod
the woods that had been the scen