Three days after this Curtin and Anna Darcy, who often walked together, having gone to the pass of hemlock, cliff and tumbling water, turned in the broken sunlight and shadow back to Sweet Rocket. The maples of the upper slopes had cast almost all their leaves, but the oaks stood yet in carmine. Yesterday had fallen light rain. Earth lay moist, and soil and leaf and fern and moss sent out a haunting odor. The sun stood in Scorpio. The drama of the year was on the homeward road. It saw ahead the Archer and the Goat and the Water Bearer, the Fishes of the great deep, and the Ram that, springing forth, should take once more the road, the old road, the new road, the old-and-new road!

Now Curtin and Anna Darcy spoke, and now they were silent. It was a blessed feature of this valley that none need be talkative in order to convey, "I am at home with you."

Her visit was approaching its end. That was what people would say. "Physical presence and metaphysical presence!" said Curtin, answering her thought. "Physical and above-physical—and the generations to come will find the inclusive word."

"Oh, I shall be here still—or 'here' will be with me in the city—or it will be both. At any rate, no desolate parting!"

They passed from under hemlock and gray rock to beech trees and a dappled path. The small river calmed itself and began to flow through cultivated land. Gentian and farewell-summer made a purple fringe for the way.

"In old romances one walked into an inn or house by the road—always saying, 'It is by the road that goes on as it went before, and I presently again with it!' But never again as it was before, and never again I as before! For just there befalls the adventure that sets one climbing to a new road."

Sweet Rocket vale opened before them. Each time they looked it grew fairer, and that, they had begun to see, was because it was not separated from anything.

Said Anna Darcy, presently: "Do you know Morris's Earthly Paradise? Do you remember the Story of Rhodope? I used to know almost all of it by heart. When Rhodope is born the countryman, her father, dreams, and he seems to himself to be standing with the mother, watching

Then:—

"It is something like that that I feel for any place—and perhaps now it will be so for this and every place! It was such a blossom and now it is such a tree. All hangs therein, peoples and nations, things past and things to come! When I go away I shall find it so in any place."

"That is what you will do—and I also. Everywhere that Tree, that Man, that God!"

The vale widened at the overseer's house. The sycamore by the river stretched in the sun its great arms of white and brown, and these and the blue vault made a pattern. A dozen turkeys crossed the path in a stately, slow-stepping procession. Mary Carter was singing in the house, and little Roger singing after her. As they approached the tree and the bench around it other voices reached them; then one voice reading aloud. They saw the two Danes seated there—Frances, reading a letter. "So I did travel with you and Mr. Dane. It was so wonderful—it is all around me now! I don't clearly remember little, sharp bits of it, but I remember the whole. It has shown me a lot of things. I don't any longer mind living. It's funny, but father, too—"

Frances looked up as Curtin and Anna stepped under the tree. Bright tears stood in her eyes. She shook them away and smiled at the two. "It's a letter from the crippled boy I told you about—"

The four walked back to Sweet Rocket House. "Robert and I have but a week longer. But this place tempers the wind of the whole year. It drops honey into winter days."

Curtin asked Robert Dane, "Forth from here you go on with the work you are doing?"

"Of course. That is a department of this. But I wish to work without bitterness or violence."

The day shone about them. Rain of the night had brought into late autumn a sense of spring. Spring and autumn seemed to touch across shortened winter. The air held a divine, sweet freshness. They were aware of new life, and all objects of perception tossed back vigor and luster.

"The world renews—the world renews!" sang the river.

A little later Robert and Frances Dane at their window saw, coming up from the river, a somewhat worn automobile. Stopping before the porch the driver and owner descended and mounted the steps. "There's an old type!" said Robert. "Tall and thin, black clothes and soft hat, low collar and string tie, white hair, mustache and imperial—look, Frances, it's a picture! Once it was the horse, and he swung himself down—then the carriage, and at the door he helped out the ladies. Now it's the car. To-morrow he will descend from the airship—just like that!"

She looked over his shoulder. "It's old Major Hereward from Oakwood. He was here four years ago, that time I came alone. He's all the past! But that car's symbolic, too. He's all the past beginning to say, 'For all my fighting I begin to find myself, with all I care for, here in the present—perhaps also in the future!' He's beginning to think that it may be so with the airship. There with all that he really, really cares for! 'I always said that they couldn't get along without me, and now I begin to see that neither can I get along without them!'"

Major Hereward appeared at the dinner table. It seemed that he, too, was a cousin of Linden's, on the other side from the Danes. His place was Oakwood, twenty miles away. Old Major Linden and he had been boyhood friends. He breathed knowledge of Sweet Rocket in ancient days. His manner to Marget was delightful, though perhaps he still held in comparison, in a "this—that," Sweet Rocket House and the overseer's house. His manner to all was delightful—like old wine.

Robert Dane pondered that, and also Frances's words of the morning. Like others, he could speak as though the past, the present, and the future were islands with nothingness between. But truly he knew it was not so, and he assumed that much self-knowledge in those to whom he spoke. Now he had it, in a flash of vision, how the old wine and wheat, how the old strength of man and woman, did go on. All within the whole flashed and changed. But the whole held all. The tangential itself only went so far, then returned, and was met and welcomed. The prodigal son. He saw that contrary winds were not so contrary after all. "In the whole, and in the whole only, I am not contrary to him nor he to me. In the end one sail and one wind—and the sail due to arrive and the wind favorable."

That afternoon Major Hereward walked over the place; with him, Linden and Curtin. "I came to talk to you about something, Richard. But we'll leave it till night. I can always pull things together better then—after the day. Here's the oak Phil Linden and I planted the day we heard of First Manassas! He was eighteen and I was sixteen. The next year we both went in."

They stood beneath the tree. Said Curtin, "Much water has gone over the wheel since then!"

Major Hereward nodded. "Much! But Phil Linden and I seem to stand here together. Not just of the mind we were, but together! And many a foe grew to be a friend."

The bright day declined. The sun set in a coral sea, a crescent moon appeared, earth grew an amethyst, the stars came out. Brush was being burned and wood smoke clung in the air, and there was the multitudinous chirping, chirping in grass and bush of late autumn. It was almost November, and they built larger fires. The old parlor gleamed.

"It's a dear room, a dear, dear room!" said Major Hereward. "I don't believe any here can love these portraits as I do. Richard may look at them often, but—" He broke off. "I forgot that he is blind! I'm always forgetting it! Well, he may see the reality of them."

Richard entered, and a moment later Marget. "It's a night of the gods! How the fire leaps!"

They sat around it, Anna Darcy and Curtin and Drew and the two Danes and Major Hereward, Linden and Marget. Anna Darcy was saying: "I went down to Mimy's before supper. The preacher is there for the night—Brother Robinson."

Linden answered her. "Yes. He will be here presently. He always comes to us for an hour or so. He's a fine fellow."

Rising, he fetched Frances's violin. "What deep and dear pleasure you give, Frances!"

She played old music and new, into which the old glided, until there seemed neither old nor new, but a content very vast and rich. The wing of the music lifted them; music and flame blended. They sat in reverie, and the wealth of the world flowed, circularly flowed.

Without, in the night, a lantern passed the windows. "There is Brother Robinson," said Marget. Richard went out—they heard his voice in the hall—then he returned with the negro preacher and Zinia. He said, "Mr. Robinson—friends, all of us!" The circle widened. The preacher sat down between Linden and Robert Dane, and Zinia sat between Marget and Frances. "Play a little longer, Frances!"

The music blended with the flame, the wealth of the world flowed, flowed, circularly flowed. The Rev. William Robinson sat, a gaunt, dark figure, in long-preserved broadcloth, with a rugged, deep brown face. When he spoke his voice had unction—like the voices of most of his people—unction, but not too much of it. By sheer indomitableness he had gained a fair education, and he was a good man and a wise one. In her blue dress Zinia sat beside Marget Land. She kept silence, but her poise was like her poise in the dining room and pantry, or on the porch when Miss Darcy had taken her breakfasts there. The latter always thought of her standing beside the pillar, or in the clean, airy pantry, by the jar of flowers and the open Pilgrim's Progress, always heard her rich voice, saying, "I like that girl Mercy!"

It seemed that Robert Dane had met Brother Robinson before this at Sweet Rocket. When the violin was put by the two talked together a little, as folk might talk who liked each other. Curtin, from his corner, watched with interest Sweet Rocket in Virginia. A voice from somewhere went through his head: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all. He looked at Major Hereward, and the old man, who had stiffened at the "Mr. Robinson" and the seating in the circle about the fire, seemed now to rest at ease, in a brown study, as one who regards the expanse of things.

Miss Darcy spoke. "At Mimy's this afternoon you had begun to tell me of the building of your church and schoolhouse down the river. Then they called me and I had to go—"

"Tell them now, brother," said Linden.

Brother Robinson told, and what he told had humor and pathos and heroism. There passed, as upon a screen, the littles gathered that were much to spare, quaint efforts at money raising, labor at twilight and dawn given by laboring men, the women's extra work and their festivals. Brother Robinson was a born raconteur. Into the sheaf of his homely narrative fell vast swaths of human effort and aspiration. "And Brother Linden helped us, and old Mr. Morrowcombe gave us five dollars."

A voice came from the corner of the hearth, from Major Hereward: "I'd like to help you, too, Brother Robinson! Put me down for ten dollars."

They left the material building of the schoolhouse and the church. Said Brother Robinson: "I've got something else I want to tell you. I've had an Experience, and it's taken the heart out of my bosom and crumbled it between its fingers and put in a new one! I came to Sweet Rocket to tell it to you, Mr. Linden. But I don't see anyone here that I'd be afraid to tell it to."

"There isn't any such," said Linden. "Tell it!"