ntry house
without a pergola, she said, was something she had never heard of. A
_sine qua non_ was what she called it. So beyond the square of lawn with
its border of flowers the pergola stretched its row of trim white wooden
Doric pillars, while over the latticed roof and through it hung bine and
vine, grape, wistaria, and kadsu. Below the pergola the land broke to a
brook that gurgled through copses of alder, tangles of wild raspberry,
and clumps of blueberry and goldenrod, carrying the waters of the lake
to the Ashuelot, which bore them to the Connecticut, which swept them
southward, till quietly, and almost as unobserved by the human eye as
when they rose in the bosom of the hills, they fell into the sea.

As there was no other guest, Chip was allowed to do as he pleased. What
he pleased was chiefly to sit in the pergola, where the mauve petals of
the wistaria were dropping about him, and fill his gaze with the mystic
peace of the mountain. On Sunday morning the three Blands went to
church, leaving him in sole possession of this green, cool world, with
its quality of interpenetrating purity. He took a volume of some
ambassador's "Recollections" from his host's shelves of Victorian
memoirs; but he never opened it. He also took a cigar, but he didn't
smoke. He only looked--looked without effort, almost without
consciousness--up into the high wonderlands of peace, whence whatever
was brooding there seemed to steal into his soul and cleanse it. It was
this sense of cleansing that he carried back as a sort of possession to
New York--that and the fact imparted by Mrs. Bland during the afternoon,
regarded as unimportant, and yet retained, that Lily Bland was not their
niece.

He returned to Mountain Brook twice during that summer, and in June of
the following year. It was during this last visit that the girl who had
been to him hitherto no more than the living element of the background
gave him the impression that she was seeking an opportunity to speak to
him.

Throughout Saturday it had been an impression almost too faint to be
recorded; but it was significant to him that on Sunday morning she
didn't go to church. She shared the house with him, therefore, a fact of
which he was scarcely aware till he saw her in possession of the
pergola. With a book in her hand she had established herself in a chair
not far from that which by preference he had made his own. The act
roused his curiosity; but when he, too, had taken a b