Try as she would, Margaret could not go back. She could not, for Lynn’s sake, take up the burden she had laid down, in the futile effort to bear more. From her, no more would be accepted, so much was plain. The rest must come from Lynn.
Her heart ached for him, but there was nothing she could do, except to stand aside and watch, while his broad shoulders grew accustomed to their load. A wild impulse seized her to go to the city, find Iris, bring her back, even unwillingly, and literally force her to marry Lynn. But that was not what Lynn wanted, and Margaret herself had been forced into a marriage. Clearly, at last, she saw that she must remain passive, and cultivate resignation.
The hours went by and Lynn did not return. She well knew the mood in which he had gone away. At night, white-faced and weary, with his eyes gleaming strangely, he would come back, refuse to eat, and lock himself into his room. It had been so for a long time and it would be so until, through the slow working of the inner forces, he stepped over the boundary that his mother had just crossed.
White noon ascended the arch of the heavens, blazed a moment at the zenith, and then went on. The golden hours followed, each one making the shadows a little longer, the earth more radiant, if that could be.
Upon the hills were set the blood-red seals of the frost. Every maple, robed in glory, had taken on the garments of royalty. The air shimmered with the amethystine haze of Indian Summer, that veil of luminous mist, vibrant with colour, which Autumn weaves on her loom.
Margaret went out, leaving the door ajar for Lynn. There were few keys in East Lancaster. A locked door was discourteous—a reflection upon the integrity of one’s neighbours.
From the elms the yellow leaves were dropping, like telegrams from the high places, saying that Summer had gone. She turned at the corner and went east, the long light throwing her shadow well before her. “It is like Life,” she mused, smiling; “we go through it, following shadows—things that vanish when there is a shifting of the light.”
Across the clover fields, where the dried blossoms stirred in their sleep as she passed, through the upland pastures, stony and barren, with the pools overgrown, through a fallow field, shorn of its harvest, where only the tiny lace-makers spread their webs amidst the stubble, Margaret’s way was all familiar, and yet sadly changed.
A meadow-lark, the last one of his kind, winged a leisurely way southward, singing as he flew. A squirrel flaunted his bushy tail, gave her a daring backward glance, and scurried up a tree. She laughed, and paused at the entrance to the forest.