bind it to his soul with pain, and she is not lost to me. Nothing
is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it."

Uncle Blair looked up at the evening star. We saw that he had
forgotten us, and we slipped away, hand in hand, leaving him alone
in the memory-haunted shadows of the old orchard.



CHAPTER XXVIII

THE PATH TO ARCADY


October that year gathered up all the spilled sunshine of the
summer and clad herself in it as in a garment. The Story Girl had
asked us to try to make the last month together beautiful, and
Nature seconded our efforts, giving us that most beautiful of
beautiful things--a gracious and perfect moon of falling leaves.
There was not in all that vanished October one day that did not
come in with auroral splendour and go out attended by a fair
galaxy of evening stars--not a day when there were not golden
lights in the wide pastures and purple hazes in the ripened
distances. Never was anything so gorgeous as the maple trees that
year. Maples are trees that have primeval fire in their souls.
It glows out a little in their early youth, before the leaves
open, in the redness and rosy-yellowness of their blossoms, but in
summer it is carefully hidden under a demure, silver-lined
greenness. Then when autumn comes, the maples give up trying to
be sober and flame out in all the barbaric splendour and