It would have been nothing, nothing, if she had not pointed her words by stopping dead and turning scarlet. Denis, puzzled, gazed at her with his honest eyes; and then, like the falling of a curtain, saw what her confusion meant, both to her and to himself. He stepped forward impulsively, putting out his hands. Dorothea pressed back against the pillar, glancing desperately from side to side; then, striking them away, she turned and darted in at the open door, like a rabbit into its burrow.
CHAPTER XIII ONE NAIL DRIVES OUT ANOTHER
I looked and saw your heart
In the shadow of your eyes,
As the seeker sees the gold
In the shadow of the stream.
Three Shadows.
There is a legend which says that September is the month of the fading leaf. Townsmen may fancy so, looking at their own starved avenues, which begin to shrivel and strip themselves as early as July; but in the country the massive woods (except that an elm here and there hangs out a single crocus-yellow spray) keep the somber green of late summer to the very end of the month. Then, as the days pass, first the lime "strips to the cold and standeth naked above her yellow attire." The horse-chestnuts on some night of frost let drop all their fans in a rustling heap. The woodland paths are crisp with fawn-colored oak leaves. Last of all, in mid-November, the elms loosen to the wind and the rain those faint clouds of green and greenish-gold which have rounded the shape of their limbs, till all the wet meadows are strewn with them; and it is winter.