Donaldson found himself with a good appetite. There was nothing neurotic about him. He was fundamentally normal—fundamentally wholesome—with no trace of mawkishness in his nature. As he sipped the hot golden-brown coffee, he tried to get at just what it was that he felt when he now looked at her. It came to him suddenly and he spoke it aloud,
"I seem to have, this minute, a fresher vision of life than I have known since I was twenty."
It was something different from anything he had experienced up to now. It was saner, clearer.
"It is the morning," she hazarded. "I never saw the grass so green as it is this morning; I never felt the sun so warm."
"It is like the peace of the inner woods,—only brighter," he declared.
"You said such peace never came to any one unless alone."
"Did I?"
She nodded.
"But it is like that," he insisted. "Only more joyous. I think it is the extra joy in it that makes us not want it alone. Queer, too, it seems to be born altogether of this spot, of this moment. Understand what I mean? It does n't seem to go back of the moment we entered this room and—," he hesitated, "it does n't seem to go forward."
"It is as though coming in here we had stepped into a beautiful picture and were living inside the frame for a little," she suggested.