A MOUNTAIN intervale all velveted in green, and half the verdure overlaid with gold by broad rays of sunset falling level through the pass,—the hills, behind, a gray and gloomy encampment softened with wreaths of vapor and dim recesses of deepest purple, and here and there above the gaps a pale star trembling on the paler blue. In spite of the approaching night, there was a gay glad strength about the scene, so that all who saw it might have felt light at heart, as if the rocky rampart shut out the sorrows of the world and made the charmed valley an enchanted place.

They had been mowing in the intervale; half-formed haycocks, picturesquely piled along the meadows, loaded the air with heavy sweetness; in one, partly overthrown, a lounger lolled luxuriously, singing idly to himself that little Venetian song of Browning’s, to some tune delightful as the words:—

The perfumed wind blew softly over the singer, like a placid breath; the sense of gathering evening hung above him; he lay upon the billowy hay as if it were a cloud; he was a voluptuary in his pleasures; well for him if they were always as innocent.

A young girl approached the singer, swinging her hat as she came, and radiant in the low sunshine.

She was named Orient,—either because she seemed, with her golden locks, her fresh fair tints, like an impersonation of morning and the East, or because when she was born hope’s day-star rose again in her mother’s forlorn heart. Such a lovely yet half-fantastic creature was she, that you hardly believed in her existence when away from her.

“What are you looking for, Orient?” said the lounger.

“The fountain of youth,” answered her silvery tones. “It should be somewhere in this happy valley.”

“You do not need it,” he replied after a lingering glance.

She stooped and extricated a long sweetbrier bough from the hay with which it had been bent but not cut down, and twisted it, still blossoming, round and round her head till it made a fragrant diadem of rosy stars.

“Do not,” said Reymund. “Take it off; or I shall have to do as Voltaire did: erect my long, thin body and stand before you like a point of admiration!”

Orient did not reply; and, fulfilling his threat, he went on by her side to the old farm-house that had been turned into a summer hostelry for guests. More stars were beginning to steal forth in the tender firmament; the breeze blew down more freshly from the hills and brought the big dews and scattered starbeams with it; music was hushed, and all the world was still. It was summer evening, yet an unreal kind of summer, as summer might be in a distant dream, blown over by cool, awakening winds. Now and then Orient stopped to pick up a great butterfly that had fallen benumbed from its perch and lay it gently to rest among the leaves, without brushing a speck of dust from its freckled wings; after that her fingers worked in a vine by the way, and she pulled aside a tendril that kept a sleepy flower from shutting up its petals. As she did so, a little mother-bird upon her eggs stirred and briefly twittered out her secret to Orient’s ear. Reymund, who loitered in waiting for her, thought she seemed, as much as any of them, like a flower, a moth, a bird herself, a beautiful and almost dumb existence of nature.

He was not a man easily intimidated, or of unvaried experience; but the thin atmosphere of awe about this girl was something he had never penetrated; the ease with which he met another, toward her became impertinence; gay and careless with many, he felt that she was something apart, sacred as a passion-flower; he scarcely dared approach her lightly; when he spoke to her he crossed himself in his heart.

They had never met until a month ago, yet their address had been familiar almost from the first; on her side, through a large-eyed, childlike fearlessness; on his—he could not have answered why. He watched her as one watches a clear planet glow steadily from the soft, golden sky, but he seemed nevertheless to know all her characteristics without studying them,—he imagined that to one weary of trifle and artifice and the hollow way of the world, here was the rest divine. Yet beyond a point, he found this cool, remote being inaccessible,—as though there had been a gulf between them. He knew not how to call the blush to her cheek, the sparkle to her eye; if she had been some alien creature she might have been nearer,—to enrich her with human love was as fruitless an effort as scattering the pollen of a rose into the heart of a cold white lily. And yet, Reymund knew—as if through the same natural operations as those by which his pulse was made to beat, his breath to draw—that Orient’s soul needed his for its entireness; that his soul required hers, all as much as a star needed its atmosphere, a flower its fragrance, the earth itself its spheral roundness. It was not so much that he already loved her passionately, as that he felt himself lost without her; he had been in Orient’s presence, it seemed, all the time that he had ever lived; how could he then depart from it? If that which was a clod suddenly found itself a bed of blossom, how could it ever return again to dreary earthiness?

He watched her now approaching. Had any one said that she trailed lustre behind her as she walked, he would have answered that he had seen it. But to speak to her of any grace or charm or perfection that she possessed,—why, these things were herself, her identity, sacred and secret; as easily to some skyey messenger of solemn heaven commend his airy flight!

“In what wonderful ways these mountains change their expression!” said Reymund, as she joined him again at last.

“Yes,” she replied, “they are different beings every hour.”

“A little while ago,” he continued, “they seemed like an army of giants sitting down to besiege the valley; now they are a wall between us and mankind; death cannot break through it, sickness cannot cross it.”

“They are more alive than that,” said Orient. “This old sombre one moved aside just now to make room for the little alp laughing over his shoulder, with the rosy vapor streaming high on her face.”

“Perhaps you hear what they are saying to one another, then?” he asked, half jestingly.

“I often do.”

“And you will translate?”

“No. In the first place you would laugh; in the last place disbelieve.”

“On my soul—no!”

“I am not certain that you have a soul.”

“Indeed? Is it so?” half sadly.

“They say what the torrents rushing down by Chamouni say!”

“Ah! And at other times?”

“They talk of the beginning of the earth, and conjecture concerning the end of things.”

“And do they take any notice of you? Nature always seems to me careless and indifferent.”

“They invite me to come up and lie down on their great sides where the sun has lain all day before me. Yes, they always smile upon me.”

“Do not go,—at least until the mamma and I go with you.”

“I should not be afraid alone.”

No,—fear had never found the depths of those liquid, lucent eyes, he thought. “The mountains might be civil enough,” he rejoined, “and give you their purple berries to eat, their wild white brooks to drink; but I could not answer for the black bears and snakes.”

“I think I could.”

“And this, of course, is only what you interpret the hills to mean, sitting there in their grim conclave and affording us such a narrow coronal of sky?” asked Reymund, smiling.

“I do not know,” she answered doubtfully. “I said things were real to me.”

“There must have been those like you, who first saw and believed in fairies and all the goblin people,” he said, still smiling.

“My father died before I was born,” said Orient. “Perhaps that gave me some lien upon the spiritual world.”

“Then you see bogles as well as other things,—as well as the personalities of bud and bird and granite pile? Uncanny creature! What pleasure shall I take in meeting your glance when it rests also on a dead man behind me, and on the fetch of one about to join the innumerable caravan beside me? I must take my revenge normally and in kind,—if I die before you, you shall surely have a visitation from me. How should you like that?”

“You would be just as welcome then as now,” she answered gravely.

“An equivocal compliment. Nevertheless, I accept it as a challenge. Will you promise its counterpart?”

“When I die,” said Orient, “I shall have other things to do.”

“But I would like to see a ghost, just to be assured that there are such things.”

“As if there could be any doubt!”

“You understand, then,” he said, as she went in under the low woodbine-curtained door, “that at some time—when time shall be no more—I will cast my shadow at your feet!”

It was an hour later that, while he still strolled in the short, wet grass and enjoyed the rich, half-dusky atmosphere, he heard Orient singing gently from her window, as she leaned out upon the cool, star-sown air, and the song seemed to belong to her, like a natural expression, as to the night the night-wind, or to the dark the dew:—

Even while he heard her singing, the sense of her remoteness gave Reymund a slight shudder. If she had been one shade more human; if he had ever seen her moved by any sparkle of wit, any drollery of humor, into a frolicking outburst of laughter, by any mischievous vexation into a flash of anger, a season of pettishness,—but no, such little incidents affected her no more than thistle-down affects the wind; and, recognizing it, Reymund knew that he loved her, yet felt somehow as he felt who had pledged a bridal ring upon the finger of a ghost; as that youth felt, perchance, whose beautiful mistress was after all a ghoul. He need not have concerned himself; Orient had no especial care for him; he passed before her, busy in her world of dreams, like a shadow; if she smiled upon him, it was as she smiled on everything else about her, as she smiled on the pink-wreathed peach-bough, on the urchin tumbling in grass, on the sunbeam overlaying both, on blue sky or on rainy weather; though, indeed, for the latter, Orient had superfluous smiles; she was always sunny herself upon a stormy day; she used to say that it seemed as if Nature had grown so familiar with her that she could afford to receive her and show herself to her in undress. Perhaps, had Reymund been more free himself from the soil and stain of earth, Orient would not have been so intangible.

They were going one day up the mountain, Orient, her mother, the guide, and Reymund, the first two riding, Reymund and the guide on foot. The air was so clear that it seemed like living in the inside of a crystal; everything stood with sharp outlines, as if drawn with a burin upon the deep substance of the blue: far away tender gauzes took up the distance, but that was merely on the outside edges of the world. After they had exhausted the view from the wide-reaching summit, where the eye seemed to wrest from the Creator more than had ever been given to it, they went below into the shelter of the great rocks and lunched. It was late in the afternoon ere they remounted and sought their way down the long descent. The path which had been slight with difficulties in climbing was now full of downward terrors. Orient bent far back in her seat, unable to see where her horse would plant his feet. It seemed to her that he was stepping over sheer abysses, and just as she herself went sliding and slipping forward over his head and down, a strong arm from an unseen form behind the cliff, round which she had just wound, would grasp her, and Reymund would hold her firm till the beast stood four-square again. It was to her a thing like the arm of Providence made visible to faith. Suddenly the girth broke, and but for that strong arm on the instant outstretched, Providence itself alone knows what would have become of her. Reymund caught her then as she reeled from the saddle, and placed her on the ground. The horse, startled by the unexpectedness of the affair, fled forward; the guide left the bridle he had held behind and pursued him. Catching the rein with a jerk and oath, he dealt such a blow with his boot that the animal lost his balance and fell, and would have rolled over the precipice but for a prostrate tree. In a moment what Reymund had wanted to see was granted him. Orient sprang forward, her face aflame, her eyes like balefires. The guide, amazed, as one might be at the sight of an avenger in his path, obeyed her single word, her vehement gesture, and plunged down the way and left them.

“Orient! what have you done?” cried her mother.

“Well, well, mamma,” answered the suddenly convicted and penitent one, “we can follow his red cap.”

But the guide, twice too cunning, hid himself in underhung paths that he knew, and they had not a sign or signal for aid.

Nevertheless, Reymund gladly accepted this fate because of the thing that brought it, and at which another man would have looked askance. This thing, this little temper, had proved to him that Orient was human,—and, therefore, to be won. He raised the pony, remounted Orient, and did his best in place of their faithless leader, trusting more to the instincts of the animals themselves than to any mountain-craft of his own.

The sharp outlines of distant peaks began to burn and blacken, those of the nearer rock and stunted shrub to grow diffuse; the air was keen and chill, a reddening sunset smouldered in clouds below them and shut out the world, a cold, wet mist below threatened to come creeping up around them. The horses neighed to each other, grew jaded and uncertain, stopped. Masses of impassable rock closed them in on every side, save the narrow defile through which they came and the precipice below; the atmosphere was purple with shade and clung to them in dew; already one star hung out its blue lamp.

“We can go no farther,” said Reymund. “This spot is more sheltered than any we are likely to find. Let us do what we can for comfort, and wait for the morning.”

The mother bewailed herself; but Orient made cheer, and while Reymund corralled the horses, she was busy collecting twigs and splinters and bits of wood and dry moss in a pile. “Light them with your matches, Reymund,” she said. “A cigar will keep you warm, but we need a bit of blaze, perhaps.”

“When it is darker,” he replied; “you will need it more a little nearer to the witching time.”

“Do you imagine we shall see witches?”

“Take care, or you will see stars.”

sang Orient. “After all, it is not the Walpurgis Night.”

“If we could only have a cup of tea!” sighed the mamma, at a loss for her luxuries in the wilderness.

“It will be so much more refreshing to-morrow,” said Orient. “And seasoned with romance,—a dash of danger,—your first adventure, little mother!”

But the little mother had no fancy for adventures; and while her daughter lost all her serenity and was crazy with delight at the wild beauty of the thing, she grew more and more lachrymose, and afforded at last a good background of shower for all Orient’s rainbows. Thereon Orient, sitting down, put her arms round her and comforted her, till the mother became herself somewhat alive to the circumstance that one seldom saw such a scene twice in a lifetime.

They had remained on the rocky platform where they paused, a shelf that after a few yards ended in an abrupt fall that led away by a course of stark precipices into the great valley beneath. This valley, filled with rolling vapor, whose volumes, smitten by sunset, were fused in splendid color, made a pavilion of cloud beneath them where billows of fleecy crimson and shining scarlet curdled together into creamy crests, here seeming to lash in feather-white foam against the base of some crag, and there letting a late sunbeam plough through spaces of a violet-dark drift till they were all inwrought with gold. Above them the cold and mighty heaven was already faintly but thickly strewn with stars.

“Into what awful and glorious region are we translated!” cried Orient. “We are above the world and the people of the world. Are we flesh and blood?”

“The free spirits of the air ‘have no such liberty’ as this of ours,” said Reymund.

“It is just as if we were dead!” shivered the mamma. “And I’m sure it’s cold enough for that!”

Orient wrapped the shawls about the doleful little woman, while Reymund opened his knapsack for any remnants of lunch that might afford them consolation. He kindled the fire, too, for the colors were fading away beneath, and the sky was getting gloomy overhead; and, warmed and enlivened in the genial light of the briefly crackling blaze, they forgot that they were lost upon the mountain, and all the possible horrors of their fate. But to Reymund there were few horrors in it, for if he died of exposure and starvation there on the bald, pitiless mountain, it would be with Orient in his arms at last.

While the fire crackled, Reymund found in his breast-pocket a tiny flask of cordial which he divided into three portions. “Drink it,” he said to them, “and make it take the place of the tea. It is Chartreuse—oily sunshine—distilled from the cones of some old fir-tree. First cousin to the cedars of Lebanon, for all I know. Mark how you taste hemlock in it. Socrates poisoned with hemlock? No, no; he drank himself to death on Chartreuse.”

Orient heard him indignantly. “I do not like it,” said she, when her turn came, and left hers in the horn. Reymund laughed; he hesitated a moment, then tossed it off himself.

The fire did not last them long, for all the twigs they could collect were scanty; the blaze had heated the rock a little; they drew closer to it, and the mother, curling up against it in her shawls, composed herself as she could for slumber; the voices of Orient and Reymund, from where they still sat and talked together, lulled her as the murmur of the waterfall lulled Sleep himself. Orient was repeating Jean Ingelow’s dream of her lover fallen and dead among the hills, with its vague and awesome imagery. “I do not understand,” she said, as she ceased, “this solicitude that my mother and so many others feel concerning their burial-place. I love life, delicious life; but if we die and lie unburied here forever among the lonely precipices, it will not matter any more to us than it did to the youth.” And she repeated again:—

Reymund quaked at the moment, as he thought of any lustrous lock of Orient’s curling out of the fierce beak that should tear it away from the white brow. Then he said: “Too philosophic by half. As for me, with the first peep of day in this high meridian, I shall be up and doing, and find a way to our level again or—perish in the attempt.”

“Resolved to perish, any way. Give you liberty or give you death. I do not feel in such a hurry to be gone. How silent and solemn it is,—what a clear darkness,—listen a moment and catch the sough of that pine forest far beneath, like the wings of some great spirit sifting the air. I have never been so near heaven. I understand now why in the Bible they so often withdrew into a high mountain.”

Reymund did not answer her. “Say your prayers, innocent one,” was what he thought. “Wherever you are, there heaven is near.”

By and by Orient crept closer to her mother for mutual comfort, wound her own cloak round her like a chrysalis, and drowsed and dreamed.

Reymund sat beside her, his knees drawn up, his hands clasped round them. It was very cool; the air was so still that he wondered at the absence of a stinging frost, and he hugged himself thus for warmth. Orient stirred in her half-recumbent sleep, and her head fell on his shoulder. After that the solid mountain was less immovable than he. He let the beautiful head remain, watching it with downcast, sidelong gaze; if he had longed with all his heart to smooth one tress, to put his arm over her in a sheltering embrace, he dared not touch her. Something said to him that she was of a grade above, as the disembodied is beyond the clay; said, too, that whatever lovely or fine there might be in himself, the thickness of the outer wrapping rendered it invisible to her; that for Orient to read him right he must wait for another life. In spite of all that, he hoped,—hoped madly and wildly, there in the chill night, with the beautiful head fallen on his shoulder and the sweet, warm breath stealing gently across his bending brow. He had a strange fancy now and then that out of the encircling shadow a great face came and looked,—whether that of some uncreated thing, some phantasm of his brain, or that of some celestial being, some resident of vast spaces, or only a wild beast, a big, brown bear, roving on their tracks and coming to peer about their unprotected bivouac. Whatever it was, it retired as often as it came, awed in its turn, he thought, by the sweet innocence of that golden head. A late moon rose down over the low side of the earth as he still sat there; he knew it by the strange coppery light that began to glow through the vapors that yet filled the gulfs beneath, and boil them to a scum of dark, dun gold; then at last a broad beam parted the tumbling and sulphurous fogs, and the bright, thin crescent of the waning moon cut itself out on a clear air behind the horn of the hill, and, as if swinging from its sharp cusp, hung the watery diamond of the morning star. Still Reymund did not lift the head from his shoulder; he chose rather that the fair apparition of daybreak at this height above the earth might happen to him, as if through the imposition of that dear and tender touch. By and by she stirred restlessly,—the spell of her slumber was breaking; he moved away gently and left her the rock for a pillow. When the heavens were paling and retreating in a mist of star-breath, and when all the world was whitening about her and the great floor of cloud beneath was inwrought by dawn with sparks of fire, so that they seemed wrapped in an atmosphere of flame and snow, Orient awoke.

No hero in his self-restraint, in one wild, forgetful moment of that morning, Reymund told Orient that he loved her.

She repulsed him so gently that it gave him reason to hope, yet so firmly that he could do nothing but despair.

He urged that she was unconscious of herself, that she did not know her own heart, nor what it wanted; that he had approached her inner life more nearly than another might ever do; that, give him time and chance, he could not fail to win her.

She only answered that she was not won.

Before, in their windings and wanderings, they had reached the foot of the mountain that day, they met their recusant and repentant guide coming up with others in search of them, and all their toil and trouble were over.

Reymund’s holiday was over too. He was to return next day to his home, to engagements previously formed and not to be disregarded.

“At least,” he said to Orient, not sadly, but with a certain vigor of intention in his tone, “you will allow me to visit you at your mother’s house?”

“You could not do a kinder thing,” answered Orient, feeling now the gap that he would leave, and which nothing could quite fill, and willing to grant him anything but what he most desired.

“Then you will see me on Saturdays.”

“Every Saturday!” she exclaimed, with a bright face that made his heart bound. “That is too much to ask.”

“Of you, perhaps; not of me. Sunday is a spare day; if I use it for God’s worship, it shall be at what shrine I please,—St. Orient’s or another’s.”

“And it is such a long ride,” demurred she, remembering the miles on miles of low sea-coast country threaded with rivers and inlaid with marshes, that he must cross, all day flying along through their damp breath and salt winds. “Nine hours; I am afraid I ought not to allow it. And yet,—and yet, nine or nineteen, it shall make no difference.”

Orient had hesitated in her last sentence, wondering how she could deny herself the sympathy in her little pursuits that through this time she had received from Reymund. She had not encountered it before; it was delightful to her; perhaps it only had not taught her love because she did not know what love was. She had but little knowledge of human nature, almost none at all of her own nature: she preferred natural religion before theology, natural history, with its grandiose revolutions, before the petty struggles of warriors and diplomatists which her view was not broad enough to throw into epochs and revolutions more grandiose yet: it was Reymund who had taught her to look with kindly curiosity upon the lives of those about her, in hopes, it may be, of teaching her at last to look in upon her own. Of that she was unaware; but the interest in the flower never found before to-day, the discovery of the bird whose note had ravished the ear last sunset, the hunt up brookside and hill for a fragment of quartz that should have a mountain range and outlying spurs of amethyst crystals, or one full of imbedded beryls, the shining hexagons like drops of light filtered through seawater, or any heap of blooded garnets, a blaze of concrete color; the search into the age of the old pine-tree on the precipice; into the mountain strata, and the wonderment concerning that day of the earth’s date on which they were upheaved; the tracing out the path of some glacier with all its ancient and icy terrors overgrown by the verdant moss and turf of the moraine; the perpetual looking for the Maker’s fingers in his work,—all this, and such as this, she would miss and must resign if she forbade those recurring Saturdays. And then, on the other hand, a friend to meet with the results of work, the choice book, the week’s research, its thought, its fancy: she who had had no intimates, few friends—

Reymund did not wait for her to balance her ideas.

“The train arrives,” said he, “by five o’clock,—a little before. Every Saturday, therefore, at five o’clock, I shall be in your drawing-room.”

The thing was settled, then, without her. She began all at once to fear that, after all, it would not happen so; he would let other things creep between; when he was fairly at a distance from her he would be angry with her for having quite failed to feel that entire satisfaction in him, to give him that love which, in a high ideal, she believed to be due from every woman to her husband; a thousand things would hinder.

“I can hardly believe it,” she said.

“I am too happy when you doubt it,” he replied, half reading her thoughts. “It gives me hope; for we can easily believe that to which we are indifferent. How can I be hindered when I will it,—and when you wish it?” The blush that streamed up her temples doubly pleased him. “Do not doubt it!” he exclaimed, with more vivacity than so small a thing appeared to demand. “For, see, I swear it! I will be with you on each Saturday at five o’clock, with your permission, until the day I die!”

So, dropping her hand, he went down the lane to the coach. But, looking back, he saw her still standing in the doorway, hung with such drooping drapery of woodbine round her head, the sunlight lying in a glory on her golden hair, the downy bloom upon her cheek as though it were a peach, a smile upon her lip, and heaven’s own blue within her eye,—she seemed the incarnation of a summer sunrise. He saw the riotous wind lift one curl and twine it with the next, drop the petal of a rose upon her mouth, kiss and kiss again her ivory forehead, free and welcome where he dared not venture,—and the love in his heart made the blood boil hotly up his veins to cheek and brow,—and for all testimony to his thrilling passion, he only cried, “Every Saturday, at five o’clock!” and was away.

But before Reymund plunged afresh into the exterior world, which, for these weeks, had been shut from his sight, he turned aside for one last outlook upon pleasure. Thus it happened that he left the train at an earlier station than the one near Orient’s home, partly to avoid recognition in the future, partly for the sake of mounting and subduing a spirited horse which had been brought up to tear himself into a foam at sight of the engine. Reymund meant to gratify himself that day with a stroll through Orient’s garden and among the haunts of her bright youth. No one would have taken him for anything but an apparition, who saw him galloping down the long country roads in a cloud of dust. When he had conquered the angry temper of the beast he abated his gait and paced slowly along the margin of the twice-mown meadows, splendid in noon sunshine, over the shaven surfaces of rusty reds and browns, into which they shaded all their gilded verdure. Now and then a bittern cried from the bank of a tiny thread of the tide, other notes were hushed, there was only to be heard through the wide midday air the unbroken treble of the crickets, across which the rich horns of the locusts shrilled like the elfin trumpets of a summer’s state. Reymund hitched his horse, found a penetrable portion of the garden paling, and entered.

It was a large, old garden, laid out, fifty years ago, perhaps, in a kind of pleasance; for in one place a slight hill rose above the rest, while paths wandered round it into new and unsuspected regions; in another a brook meandered and sang silverly over shining pebbles, and among arrow-heads and lily-pods, and, dallying, went its way at last to empty into some tide-streak and find the sounding sea that called to it all night. Weeds, of course, had overgrown the beds, the untrained grapes hung heavily from wall and trellis, wasps and blackbirds made merry together with the nectar of ripening pears, plum and peach dropped ungathered from the bough; vine and tendril, leaf and spray, and branch and blossom, all wrought themselves to a delicious tangle of perfume and rustle and color. Here, through the beautiful and envious weeds, a gladiolus reared his flames, a larkspur absorbed the very blue, a carnation scattered spice; here honeysuckles still blew out a perfect fragrance, while mourning-brides and gillyflowers and spiked lavender and pansies sowed the air with their old-fashioned sweetness. The soft, lonely sky stretched away over the garden and the meadows to haze itself round low and distant woods, and all the empty air seemed sad and desolate between,—the fulness and richness of life at its high noon touching close upon the anti-climax of desert solitude. Through the place a light east-wind was blowing that had in it a tonic for the lungs like the sparkle of champagne. And, somehow, through all the spaces of the neglected garden the spell of Orient seemed complete. There Orient must have stood to twine that white rose upon the porch; there her fingers must have twinkled among the young vine-leaves; there, on that bank of turf, she must many an afternoon have sat at work; there, in the shallow crystal of the brook, she had waded with white feet to set the water-plants. These lichen-covered apple-trees had shed, how many a springtime, the rosy snow of their petals around her head; these gnarled old bergamots had dropped their pulpy globes into her hands; this nut-tree put out its leaves on the day when she was born; her little feet had worn these paths. The garden was the shadow of Orient herself, reduced to dumb and to material things. He wondered what it would be by the magic of moonlight,—the whole place silvered over with tranquil sheen, and raised from every day’s dull sight into the dreamy and ideal,—full of cool dew, and silence, and holy hush, as if it waited on her white sleep. Just under his feet, where the seed had been thrown in handfuls, he traced, written out with blue forget-me-nots, the name of Orient.

It would not do for him to stay much longer here; he should grow wild with hopes and fancies, for all he knew, tread out that lovely name with his heel. She must, she should be won! He clutched a cluster of the forget-me-nots, quickly escaped the labyrinth, galloped back to the station at a rate that streaked his chafing steed,—and so away from dreams to life and real work.

Thus Reymund returned to his routine; bills and lawsuits and politics, routes and rides; they were not calculated to lift him to any higher level than the old one.

And Orient and her mother came home; the mother having made quite as close acquaintance with the mountains as she cared to do.

Saturdays, now, surely as they came, brought Reymund under the same roof with Orient. Perhaps in their brief indulgence he found pardon for all the sins of the week,—for the week had its sins, its little trivial condoning of misdemeanors as unimportant, matters which lower one as steadily and certainly over the great pit, as block and tackle might do over another. On Sunday nights, when he glided away in the outward train, he felt as if it were an easy thing to maintain the height which, by Orient’s side, he gained; but after a Monday morning on the exchange, after a Tuesday night in the salon, after his evening gallop on the horse possessed with the spirit of Satan, he said to himself, “It is of no use. Nature is too crude in me, too gross a strain, too deep a dye. I should be like Shelley’s rock in the black abyss, that

The thing is to abandon.” Yet Saturday’s sunset shone for him again always over Orient’s garden.

He had come one evening and found Orient among the grape-vines, playing with a parcel of little children, as pretty, bright, and fresh as a bunch of flowers. After the hubbub of business, the dust of travel, this garden, in a far outlying city suburb stretching towards the sea, seemed as pure and innocent as Eden. On Sunday morning, when the air soared illumined with a stiller lustre, when the azure deepened as if fresh-washed by sacred rains and dews, when the winds bore no murmur but that of ripening leaf and floating petal, when the birds themselves seemed to sing in the Sabbath, and all the wide world to be gladly and tranquilly conscious of the day,—they went to church together. If Orient was rapt in the worship, Reymund was at an exaltation as high for him,—rapt in his worship of her. By times this very thing lifted him into the upper region, his soul rose buoyant on the prayer and praise, and floated forward like a waif on the full tide of the organ’s music. When, afterward, he found himself and his sentience again, he said the thing was in him,—could he but keep the pitch,—were Orient forever by him to give him that key-note. But alone we come into this world, alone we go out of it. Neither Orient nor another could, for all eternity, give the tone to any soul; that discord or that harmony which one shall make must be the result of one’s own being.

He sat with Orient, in the afternoon, on the bank of turf that sloped down to the clear, brown brook, in whose bed many a diving and dipping sunbeam wrought mosaics of light and shade with the shining pebbles. The brook rustled and lilted on its way, a bird above it turned its burden into melody, now and then a waft of wind rippled all its course till the lily leaves shivered and turned up their crimson linings, soft clouds chased one another across the sky,—everything around wore the bloom of peace and pleasure.

“I often fear,” said Reymund, “that I must come here no more. The place grows too dear for one that must some day leave it.”

Orient turned and looked at him. He saw her tremble. “Not come here any more!” she said.

“Ah, Orient!” he cried, “once I declared to you the purpose of my life. Sometimes—now—sometimes—it seems to me as if you were almost won.”

He bent above her, glowing and passionate and daring. She trembled again, neither drew away, nor surrendered herself to the waiting grasp.

“I do not know,” she answered him, the globy tears suffusing her eyes till each one shone like the great star that hung its blue lamp in the zenith that night when they were lost upon the mountain. “Perhaps I cannot read my heart; but does a woman really love that which is less strong than herself? I must lean upon my husband, not he on me.”

“Am I so weak?” asked Reymund, with some bitterness, and a quiver on his lip. “Consider. If your own nature had been invested with a coarser flesh, left out thereby to coarser temptations,—since passions are things of the flesh,—what would have come of it? Then, if thrown in the midst of the revel, loving the flash of merriment, the excitement of chance, and wine and dice were going round—But, no! such speech is profanity. Yet, Orient, under all habit, under all action, I think there is that in my soul akin to yours, made to rule it and absorb it, hidden by the body; but there,—made to be loved by you, as you, all of you, flaws and beauties, are loved by me!”

“If I could only see your soul,” said Orient, half yielding, contrite, yet uncertain.

“One day perhaps you will,” answered Reymund, his repeater giving the hour to his finger-pressure. “Now I must go.”

He rose, stooped again and touched her smooth, cold forehead with his mouth. The touch sent the blood back to his heart. “With time,” he murmured. “O, with time! she shall yet—she shall! Good by,—till Saturday again at five o’clock!” and then was gone.

All that week Reymund walked through his work with an absent mind, as if his spirit had half left his body, disengaging itself from the automaton of bone and muscle, as one might say; abstracted and lost in his thoughts, his wishes, his absolute resolutions. Old haunts had no attraction for him, old faces brought him no satisfaction, he sought no pleasure but such as was to be found on the back of that horse possessed by the spirit of Satan. And so he existed till the sunrise of Saturday, when, before it should be quite time for the train, he had the horse brought round for a gallop, as if he would ride the wind and tame the whirlwind.

In the mean time Orient pursued her way in what, for her, was perturbation. There seemed to be a riddle in these days beyond her reading. Penitent over her pride in presuming herself to be stronger than her lover, conscious that she could not dispense with him, yet full as sure that she felt no perfect passion for him, there was nothing to do but marvel what it meant. “I am drawn to him,” she said to herself. “Ah, I know that well enough! But have I any right to be? If there were something to confirm me! If I thought the good and beautiful part were any abiding principle, were anything but love of me! If I could only see his soul!”

She was walking that Saturday afternoon in the woods that could be seen from her garden across the meadows. It was a clear October afternoon, the red leaves were dropping round her and leaving the bright blue sky more bare with every gentle gust that brought them to her feet; a bracing day of early autumn, when the wind fainted with the sweet freight of balsam from the pines, and all things only prophesied hope and lightsomeness. In spite of this, Orient could not tell why she had a constant sensation of gray and misty horizons, of marshy air and cold sea-wind all day; as she walked now, the fitful breeze in the tree-tops seemed the muffled murmur of waves on the distant beach, and once in a while she shivered as if a cold foam-wreath were flying by her face. She thought at first that all this damp and drear sensation was some sympathy with Reymund, now travelling along the sea-coast on his way to her. “But what absurdity!” she said. “Where the track lies, the sky is as blue as this one; the wind is scarcely more chilly there than here. Reymund is rolling along, comfortable among his cushions and books; and not a naked spirit all abroad in the sea-scented air!”

She went home on the causeway that was laid along the meadows,—hurrying a little, for she judged by the sinking sun that it must be nearly time for the arrival of the train. As she went, she heard her name called.

She turned, for the voice seemed to come from the woods. But seeing no one, she fancied the note of some bird had followed her.

Again the sound. Her name; and Reymund’s voice. “He has come,” thought Orient, with a thrill of unsuspected pleasure, “and he is calling me from the garden.” And she made all haste to answer the summons in person. Going along, then, with her boughs of bright leaves, she wished she had not delayed so long in the woods,—her dress so soiled, and her hands, her hair so disordered; she resolved to steal in at the side door and freshen her toilet before greeting him. As the door was opened to her, “Mr. Reymund has come,” said the maid, gleefully. “I have just let him in. He is waiting in the drawing-room.”

“Very well,” answered Orient. “Tell him I will be there directly.”

She hastened towards the staircase, boughs in hand.

“You haven’t seen your friend?” asked her aunt, passing her on the landing as she sped up.

“No,” replied Orient again; “have you?”

“I just met him in the hall as he was entering the drawing-room,” said the good woman, calling over the balusters and going her way.

Orient hurried at her bath, clad herself with all despatch, and put on a garment whose airy frills and ruffles made her look like a white rose. As she went by her mother’s room, the mother looked out and said, lightly, “Reymund has come. Did you know it?”

“Yes, mamma,” she answered. “Why didn’t you go and make him welcome?”

“O, my hair was all down!” said the other. “I just caught a glimpse of him, passing the foot of the stairs as he went into the drawing-room.”

So Orient stepped slowly down, adjusting her bracelets as she went. She saw Reymund a second, as the winding way of the stairs for that space allowed her, standing in the bay-window and looking out. She did not know what made her so hesitate to enter. She paused a moment longer in the doorway, gazing in.

The room was very gay with bunches of deep-blue and scarlet salvia, and drooping clusters of barberry boughs stringing their splendid pendants all along most graceful curves; but there was another brightness than that in the room. It was where Reymund stood in the embrasure of the window, with the late sunlight falling all over him. She wondered that he did not advance to meet her; but, as she wondered, went up the room toward him.

“Something must have happened to make him very happy,” thought Orient. “I never saw such a smile!”

Perhaps it was this smile that so transfigured him; a plain man commonly, the sunshine now seemed to bring out rich, dark tints on the countenance, the eyes overflowed with light, and whether it were grace of posture, overlying sunshine, or beaming smile, features and face and figure expressed a subtle harmony, and the man was beautiful,—beautiful as a strong angel pictured in some instant of stooping flight.

“He does not mean to speak till I do,” thought Orient again.

But as she drew near, the smile changed to a look of utter melancholy, as a shining cloud melts into rain,—a melancholy gaze that pierced her through and through. She put out her hand, nevertheless, to take his extended grasp.

And there was nothing there!

In the same instant, with a loud and terrible voice, crying, “Orient!”—a voice as if it were the voice of death, the tomb, and all corruption,—the thing had vanished; the place was empty!

That cry rang through the house, that loud and terrible voice. Maid and mother rushed into the room; and they found no one there but Orient, fallen unconscious to the floor.

It did not take long to revive the child. “Something has happened to Reymund,” she said, upon lifting her head. “We must go to him at once!”

“My love!” cried her mother. “The idea of the thing. The—”

But expostulations were wasted breath; while they were being made, Orient was calmly getting on her travelling-gown, and, seeing herself powerless, the mother—with her heart palpitating in the ends of her fingers through awe and through alarm, and interweaving with the ejaculations that escaped her chattering teeth a thousand instructions to her quaking maid and sister—hastened to do likewise and be off with her.

Thus it happened that the telegram from Reymund’s brother crossed the travellers on their way; and they reached his brother’s house in the gray of the shivering morning.

It was just as Orient’s heart had told her. Reymund had been thrown from his horse on the previous morning, striking his head on a curbstone’s edge; he had been taken up senseless, and had lain since then in a stupor only broken by his twice calling her name in the afternoon. At a little after five o’clock he had risen on the pillow, and in a loud and terrible voice had called Orient again, and then had fallen back; and whether he were dead or alive there was no one able to say.

Orient threw off her hat and shawl and stole into the apartment where Reymund had been placed. The white face that fastened her eye was still as a mask of clay, and there was stamped upon it that look of unutterable melancholy into which she had seen the smile fade yesterday,—the linen where it lay was less white, a marble image had been less still. As Orient bent there her breath stirred the dark lock of hair on the brow, and the slight and airy motion of itself brought into forceful being all the awful immobility and silence of death.

“He does not breathe! His heart does not beat! Will he never open his eyes again?” she said. “O Reymund, Reymund, I love you!”

She bent nearer as she sighed the words, and her lips were sealed to his.

A quiver ran through all the frozen frame reposing there beside her, a pulse of warmth, perhaps, played in the hand hers clasped; the eyelids shook and lifted and unveiled the dark and woful eyes.

“You have seen my soul, Orient,” said Reymund. “Good by.”

The dark and woful eyes were veiled again. And this time Reymund’s soul was gone beyond recall.