This was inexpensive, and it seemed to do her as much good as a holiday
could have done. Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing; it
had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. At the outset she had
tried several times to talk with her husband upon this subject. He
had discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare, at first
obliquely, then, under compulsion, with some directness. His thoughts
were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast, abstract schemes
of creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and
embarrassed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal
salvation. Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.

She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. The knack of
a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and
she made music which Theron supposed was very good--for her. It pleased
him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had a far
greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memories of the
yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up. Although three
months had passed, Thurston's had never asked for the first payment
on the piano, or even sent in a bill. This impressed him as being
peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy
by not going near Thurston's at all.

An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short cuts across open
pastures, but for the most part on forest paths, brought Theron to the
brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with
beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of
last year's foliage; the leaves above him were showing the first yellow
stains of autumn. A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the
air, and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the
chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.