In the afternoon the three and Tam went for a walk. They crossed the river by a footbridge and walked a mile by waterside. This brought them to valley end. The stream slipped on between close-standing hills, but the strollers turned aside into a glade from which the greater forest had been cut. Young trees and tall old trees were set with some spareness. All wore robes like princes; all glowed in a dream of spring behind winter. The ground had gray moss and green moss, and all manner of minute and charming growths. The sun so came into this glade that the wild grape found and took advantage. It leaned its wine-hued, shaggy stem against trunks; it climbed and overran, and made bridges from tree to tree. Its festoons shone aloft, its broad leaves and blue clusters dreamed against autumn sky. The air breathed dry and fine. Sunshine lay on ground in shafts and plaques of gold.

Richard Linden used a staff. Marget kept near him and Tam just ahead. Walking so, you would not think he was a blind man. Indeed, he seemed to have a sixth sense, he moved so easily. The three walked without much speech. The day was the sumptuous speaker; these woods, this feather air, the admirable poise of the year before its journey from hearth fire, the plain chant of the crickets, the trill of the bird.

In a roll over his shoulder Linden carried a wide and thick plaid. Presently Marget said: "Let us rest before we turn back. Miss Darcy isn't the tramp that we are!" whereupon they pitched camp for half an hour, spreading the plaid beneath a tree. Richard Linden, resting against a chance bowlder, locked his hands behind his head and lifted his face to the high, free sky. Marget took off her wide hat and lay down beside Miss Darcy, who sat on a stone. Tam had the dry grass and moss and the fringe of the plaid.

Marget spoke. "We are under a young hickory, Richard. It is all gold. There is a dogwood close by, and its leaves are red, and it is very full of berries. Wild grape has started by the dogwood and crossed to the hickory. It is far and near and up and down. The leaves are half green and half yellow, and there are a thousand bunches of grapes."

"I see!" he said; "and I hear a woodpecker."

"It's yonder on a white oak. It's a flicker. There isn't a cloud in the sky, and far, far up, small as a dragon fly, is a buzzard sailing. There's a cedar waxwing in the dogwood stripping berries. There is another—a third! We frightened them away, but they are coming back. They're after the grapes. There will be fifty in a moment—"

They kept still and watched, Marget's hand on Tam. Slender, graceful, tawny, crested birds came in a flock. They entered the hickory and the dogwood. With quick movements of head and body they stripped the grapes and the scarlet dogwood berries. They perched and removed, and perched again. They kept up a low talk among themselves and a perpetual flutter of wings. It was as though a wind were in the trees, so continuous was the sound. Blue grapes, dogwood berries, dropped upon the ground. For ten minutes the flock fluttered and fed, while with intent, pleased faces the human beings watched or listened. Then Tam became aware of a rabbit down the glade and started up. Away flew the cedar waxwings.

"Oh, wasn't it lovely?"

They sat still. Richard Linden, resting against the rock, kept his face raised to blue sky. "Their life!" he said. "As we enter upon their life—"

Tam came back, the rabbit having vanished. "Lie still, Tam, lie still! Get into your life-to-be for a little, and be quiet shepherd on a hill instead of shepherd's dog!"

"Their life—"

The visitor to Sweet Rocket sat still, with her eyes upon the gold fretwork of the hickory. She was thinking of the birds. It was very sunny, very still in the glade. Her companions also rested silent. They seemed to be in reverie, to be going where they would in their inner worlds.

Miss Darcy followed the waxwings in their flight. She saw the flock that had been here, and other flocks, stripping wild grape and dogwood and cedar berries. They were far and near, in many a woodland glade. In thousands they twined and turned, they talked in the clan, their wings made a windy sound. And the woodpeckers! Hammer and hammer, through the forests of the world! And the thrush that she had heard this morning, and the humming bird in the garden—and the crows that had cawed from a hillside, the hawk and the owl.... Suddenly she saw in some space an eagle rise to its nest upon a crag edge. From the one she saw others. Eagles in all the lands. For one instant she caught a far glimpse of the Idea, the absolute eagle. There was the rush of a loftier sense. Then she sank from that, but she saw eagles in all the lands. She saw the great hawks and the condors. Green waves were beneath her; with sea birds she skimmed them in the first light, and the cries of her kind were about her. On the ice floes walked the penguins, the albatross winnowed solitude. With heron and flamingo and crane she knew shore and marsh. The white swan and the black swan oared their way through still waters. In their right circle moved the peacock and the pheasant, the lyre bird, the bower bird, and the bird of paradise. The nightingale sang in deep woods, and in southern thickets of yellow jessamine sang the mocking bird. The lark mounted into the air, the cuckoo called from the hedge, the wren built under the eaves. In the gray dawn, from a thousand farms and hamlets, crowed the cocks. Over all the earth clucked the hen, peeped the downy chick. The swallows crossed a saffron sky and the whippoorwill cried in the night, and in the morning the quails said "Bob White!" Migrating hordes, like scuds of clouds, drove before favorable winds, north, south! She was plunged in the life of birds, where they waded between deep water and solid shore, where they lived in a world of green, where they flew aloft and afar, over land, over sea—all their plumage, shapes, and magnitudes. She seemed to hear their cheepings, cries and songs, to hear them and touch them, their sleekness, lightness, threaded beauty! Over all the earth spread the passionate wooing, the daylong song. Here were the nests, the multitudes, and the eggs, green and blue and white and dark. The nests and eggs became transfigured. The straw of the nests burned lines of white fire, the cup was diamond light, the shell of the egg no more than a window, and through it was seen the bird-past, and the bird desire and will and power. Out of the egg the young—she heard the nightingales in the woods, the lark in the sky!

"See the love and beauty and power and daring! See the thought and feeling pressing on—see them trooping into fuller being—see them men and women, their tribes and nations! When we have gone far, far on, see their human earth!"

It was Linden, she thought, who said that. She came back with a great throb of her heart to the earth beneath a golden hickory, to the October sun, in a little Virginian valley. Yet the two reclining there seemed still in a brown study, gone away. She thought: "I am come into a strange country! Are they knowing, feeling all that life more intensely than I, for all that they lie there so quietly, thinking, one would say, of to-morrow's work, of a book they are reading, or of the cedar waxwings?... It is all in the range of perception, could I run like light all over the earth! There are those birds and their life. I only saw what is!"

But she felt that while she had had a wave of it those two had a whole breadth of ocean. She felt that they were expert, adept. She felt again the breath of wonder. It was at once wonder and homelikeness. "Glad—glad—glad that I came! My gray road turns!"

Richard Linden dropped his hands from behind his head and passed them over his eyes. Marget rose to her knees. There was deep light in her face. She lifted then let fall her arms. "Oh, the beauty when life is seen as a landscape, heard as a symphony, smelled as a garden, tasted as nectar, dwelt in as a house!" She rose to her feet. "The sun is gone from the grass. It is dawn in Tibet. Come, Tam, let us be going home!"

They folded the plaid and left the hickory and the dogwood. The glade was turning violet, but the hilltops showed golden and the mountains stood in light. A rich scent breathed from the earth, while the air carried a spear from the north. Leaving the wood, they took again the path by the river, that sang toward them, that held pools of light.

Walking so, Marget fell to talking of Anna Darcy's life, the manner of it, her steadfast work from year to year, and all her kindnesses, and all that she had given. At first Miss Darcy tried to stop her, but then she could not try any longer, the appreciation was so sweet. Her life had been difficult, isolated for all the stir around her, subject to sorrows, a little withered and gray. She felt the exquisite caress of their interest. It was more than that to her; it was recognition.

How would it be if all were truly interested in all? If there were general recognition?

As she walked, the valley and the hills, the river and warm, dusky air, the collie, the man and woman with her, herself, seemed to shift and quiver into one. Walls vanished. There happened rest, understanding, imperviousness to harm, blood warmth, and new and strange aspiration.

It was impossible for her to hold the moment. She seemed to herself to sink again to the rigid and small shape of Anna Darcy, like an Egyptian figure graved on stone, a plane figure. But she did not wholly fit back into the figure. She felt that above it was fullness and youth and song, and that they were hers as well as another's.

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