t of it; and my own life rich, since
I now knew how truly it had become a portion of hers. She had made me
feel, know, that I counted for her--unworthy as I am--in all she had
grown to be and would grow to be. We had shaped and would always shape
each other's lives. There for the moment it rested. She would leave me,
but I was not to be alone.

No; I was not to be alone. For even if she had died, or had quite
changed and forsaken me, there would be memories--such as few men have
been privileged to recall....

INTERLUDE

On the rearward and gentler slopes of Mount Carmel, a rough, isolated
little mountain, very abrupt on its southerly face, which rises six or
seven miles up-country from the New Haven Green, there is an ancient
farm, so long abandoned as to be completely overgrown with gray
birch--the old field birch of exhausted soils--with dogwood and an
aromatic tangle of humbler shrubs, high-bush huckleberry and laurel and
sweet fern; while beneath these the dry elastic earth-floor is a deep
couch of ghost-gray moss, shining checkerberry and graceful ground pine.
The tumbledown farmstead itself lies either unseen at some distance from
these abandoned fields or has wholly disappeared along with the neat
stone fences that must once have marked them. Yet the boundaries of the
fields are now majestically defined through the undergrowth by rows of
gigantic red cedars so thickset, so tall, shapely, and dense as to
resemble the secular cypresses of Italian gardens more nearly than the
poor relations they ordinarily are.

And at the upper edge of one steep-lying field, formerly an apple
orchard--though but three or four of the original apple trees remain,
hopelessly decrepit and half buried in the new growth--the older cedars
of the fence line have seeded capriciously and have thrown out an almost
perfect circle of younger, slenderer trees which, standing shoulder to
shoulder, inclose the happiest retreat for woodland god or dreaming
mortal that the most exacting faun or poet could desire.

That Susan should have happened upon this lonely, this magic circle, I
can never regard as a mere accident. Obviously time had slowly and
lovingly formed and perfected it for some purpose; it was there waiting
for her--and one day she came and possessed it, and the magic circle was
complete.

Susan was then seventeen and the season, as it should have been, was
early May. Much of the hill country lying northward from the Connecticu