"JAPONETTE."
She closed and sealed her letter, wrote his name on the envelope, rested awhile, blue eyes seeing nothing; then, touching the envelope with her lips, she laid it between the leaves of her portfolio.
Since that day in this very place, Edgerton had spoken no more of love to her. She knew that he never would again, that what had begun here on the Path to Yesterday had ended where the path ended. Never again would he retrace those steps with her; never again travel them alone. For it was a lost road to him, a blind trail already overgrown with briars. The days made it fainter, the months were hiding it, the years would obliterate it for him. But for her, alas—she had many a pilgrimage yet to make along that briar-grown path; and many a scar, yet unmade, must heal before that path closed before her pilgrim feet, and shut out forever from her eyes the hidden shrine it led to, where the sky was rosy above the river and the starlings called through the golden light of Paradise.
And now, as she stood up, the subtle scent of autumn hung heavy in the air—a faint odor of ripening, hinting of decay and death. Summer had gone indeed—on earth and in her heart.
Never again would life be the same to her after this day, in this place, alone with memory; never again would she be the same. How old her heart had become—how old—how old! O amari dies! O flebiles noctes!
She rode that afternoon with Colonel Curmew, accepting him instead of another because she thought his chatter might leave her freer to follow her own thoughts.
But after a while it seemed to her as though she could no longer endure them, and that the colonel's inanities were preferable.
They were riding down a mountain road, the horses picking a cautious way among the scattered stones.
He was paying court to her, as usual, and she had been riding on, smiling absently, preoccupied with her own thoughts and mentally oblivious to him, when there came a clatter of stones from behind, and Scott Wallace galloped recklessly up at the risk of his horse's neck as well as his own.
"Halloo!" he said cheerfully; "hope I'm not smashing a twosome, colonel."