shadow of some gnarled trunk and in dipping
hollows the leaves were packed close in a damp and moulding compress.
Great streamers of wild grape-vine hung precariously from weary limbs
and swayed to and fro gently in the wind that came mounting up the
slope from the west and went dipping away to the eastward, leaving a
soft, shuddering wake. It was as if a mellower spirit hovered about
the old giant knob resting there, watching with its head all venerably
gray, though the sunlight ere it faded was elfishly splashing the
shadow with golden green, and little flecks of crimson and orange came
flashing through the tangle of branches as they passed, making light
mockery. And then the trees suddenly opened and they came out upon a
flat bare knoll, where the road, making a loop, signified that its
journey was over. Around the outside edge was a wall of loose stones
from which the hill sloped steeply in all directions, and before them,
stretching away for miles, lay the country through which they had
passed, till soft and green and gray in the distance. A huge smoke
pall, its feathery top drifting slowly eastward, hung over a
cup-shaped depression, and below it stretched a darker line, from
which occasionally emerged a solitary stack, or above which a church
spire, caught by an errant ray from the setting sun, would flash a
momentary beacon. Slowly the mantle seemed to fade and mingle with the
twilight, and even as they watched, a light flashed out, a single
pin-prick of a light, and then another and another, as night,
gathering in its intensity, swept over the valley, until it was met by
an ever-increasing challenge. It was like a myriad host of fairy
fire-flies, each diamond pointed, flickering, blinking, never still.
And there settled on the under side of the smoke pall a lurid glow as
of banked fires, waiting for the work of another day.

Mary Louise breathed a soft little sigh.

"It does get next to one, some way, doesn't it?" he said.

Rather to her thoughts she replied aloud: "To think of all those
people living there, almost in the grasp of the hand. Think of them
moving, scurrying about among those lights. It makes one feel it would
be so easy to do things for them, move them about at one's will--from
here. And yet----" She was silent a moment, thinking. "And yet even to
be able to raise one's head above it all, to see--and be seen!
Well----"

"That's what I mean to do." He spoke almost as if she were not there,
an