afternoons. She had spent many hours, lying on the grass in the shade of
the dismantled house, looking through the gaunt, uncovered rafters of the
barn at the white clouds, like stepping-stones in the broad blue river of
sky flowing between the mountain walls.

Older people of the summer colony called it forlorn and desolate--the
deserted farm, lying high on the slope of Hemlock Mountain--but to the
child there was a charm about the unbroken silence which brooded over the
little clearing. The sun shone down warmly on the house's battered shell
and through the stark skeleton of the barn. The white birches, strange
sylvan denizens of door and barnyard, stood shaking their delicate leaves
as if announcing sweetly that the kind forest would cover all the wounds
of human neglect, and soon everything would be as though man had not
lived. And everywhere grew the thick, strong, glistening grass, covering
even the threshold with a cushion on which the child's foot fell as
noiselessly as a shadow. It used to seem to her that nothing could ever
have happened in this breathless spot.

Now she was a grown woman, she told herself, twenty-three years old and
had had, she often thought, as full a life as any one of her age could
have. Her college course had been varied with vacations in Europe; she had
had one season in society; she was just back from a trip around the world.
Her busy, absorbing life had given her no time to revisit the narrow green
Valley where she had spent so many of her childhood's holidays But now a
whim for self-analysis, a desire to learn if the old glamour about the
lovely enchanted region still existed for her weary, sophisticated
maturity, had made her break exacting social engagements and sent her back
alone, from the city, to see how the old valley looked in the spring.

Her disappointment was acute. The first impression and the one which