"She would have made everything else look cheap--if it could have been."




CHAPTER XXI

THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER

The last rays of the setting sun touched the gorgeous Autumn woods with
a loving, bright glow, and the day stole pensively away into a purple bed
beyond the sight of the eyes. From a lonely spot by the river, Fleda
watched the westering gleam until it vanished, her soul alive to the
melancholy beauty of it all. Not a human being seemed to be within the
restricted circle of her vision. There were only to be seen the deep
woods, in myriad tints of bronze and red and saffron, and the swift-
flowing river. Overhead was the Northern sky, so clear, so thrilling,
and the stars were beginning to sparkle in the incredibly swift twilight
which links daytime and nighttime in that Upper Land. Lonely and
delicately sad it all looked, but there was no feeling of loneliness
among those who lived the life of the Sagalac. Many a man has stood on a
wide plain of snow, white to the uttermost horizon, or in the yellow-
brown grass of the Summer prairie, empty of all human life so far as eye
could see, and yet has felt no solitude. It is as though the air itself
is inhabited by a throng of happy comrades whispering in the communion of
the invisible world.

As a child Fleda had often gazed upon just such scenes, lonely and
luminous, but she was only conscious then of a vague and pleasant awe,
a kindly confusion, which, like the din of innumerable bees, lulled