Zorka kept her promise; and one day, who knows whence, Eric found all he needed for beginning the picture the old woman had commanded him to paint.
The tents had been pitched quite near to a forest all shining and shimmering in every shade of gold; gold under foot, gold overhead, gold falling softly from every bough.
The sun threw his glinting rays upon all the beauty that was a last glorious farewell Nature was taking from the departing year. The smoke of the camps and the mist of the autumn mornings mingled like spirit souls, and waved in moving vapours, veils that some fairy might have hung over the branches to fill her dwelling with mystic shadows and shades. From within the shelter of the wood, the great naked plain could be seen as far as the eye could reach, but the waving ocean of corn was a past dream of the summer months.
Now the fields and pastures looked desolate and barren, dark and cold, even beneath the face of the kindly life-giving planet that shone down upon it with a friendly face.
The rusty tents resembled dwarf pyramids standing upon some desert seen from afar off.
But the forest was a palace fit for a king, fashioned out of lustrous rays all woven together into a web of sunny yellows, and there sat Eric for many an hour trying to make his picture live.
Stella never refused to let him take her hand, and followed him meekly whither he led. He seated her upon a bank of grass, having first covered it over and over with leaves of fiery red.
For her lovely feet he made a nest of warm green moss, and at her side he laid a sycamore leaf full of jet-black bramble-berries as polished as agate balls.
Out of their flexible branches he wound a wreath about her head; their fading leaves made a many-tinted crown, more beautiful than a queen could wear, all amber, topaz, and burnished gold, deep and rich in hue, splashed in places as with stains of blood.
In and out among the rusty leaves he had plaited dark purple aster stars that nestled among her waving hair. Whilst his nervous fingers were by slow degrees laying hold of his forsaken art, Stella played him ancient tunes of such melting sweetness that often his hot tears flowed down and mixed in crystal rivulets with the colours on his palette. As she played, all the visions of the days of his wanderings rose up out of the distance and floated like shadows before his brain.