As they looked the yellow tints merged into the blue of the robin's egg, pinks melted into lilacs and the high lights paled.
"Oh, let us go!" she said. "Let us go before it fades! I want to carry it with me forever. I cannot see it put on the dust and ashes of defeat! It always makes me think then of a life from which the coloring has gone out!"
He caught her by the hand. He too was stirred to the depths.
"Margaret, don't go!" There was a note in his voice that she had never heard there before—that it hurt her to hear now. "It is not always over when the sun goes down. Sometimes the later glory is beyond that of the first. Wait! Wait for the after glow!"
She drew her hand away, saying quickly, "I must go to Philip."
He did not try to detain her, nor did she see him again till the next morning, when he was in his usual mood of hilarity.
In thinking about it afterwards she felt sure that he had had no thought of anything but the sunset—no thought of what she had said about gray lives—but still the next day when they took their places in the boat, she had stepped into the bow, leaving the steering to Bess, who made a pretty picture with Philip beside her grasping with both chubby hands the steering rope as children hold the lines. He felt that it was his right to steer for he had now donned masculine attire, thanks to Mrs. Pennybacker. Divested of his restraining garments he was having a blissful time these days with his mud turtles down at Donahue's dock, his mother watching him, or over at the life-saving station, his hand held close in hers. Never for one moment was he out of her sight.
She was growing to love the place as much as Philip did. From her seat in the bow, her eyes resting upon the child, and the pleasant, healthful nonsense of the young people falling lightly on her ears, Margaret was beginning to put the past behind her and to live in the present. Perhaps it was the conviction, growing stronger as the weeks went by, that they had eluded Smeltzer,—perhaps that the needed companionship of youth was working a cure,—or it may have been only that here she was so close to Nature as to hold communion with her visible forms and that gradually the old mother had
"glided
Into her darker musings, with a mild