s
to the east, outlined by a thin row of trees drawn as if with a heavy
brush along the margin of the landscape. Elsewhere the hills were
rounded bare mounds. Farther north this undulating line dipped into a
green plain, and there, so the tradition ran, you could see on a clear
day the white sails of coasting schooners and a shimmer of eastern
light that might be the marshes of Essex, or indeed the blue sea
itself. This apple-tree crowned peak was a kind of lookout from the
dead country to the living sea.

Miss Ellwell brought Thornton out at the mound of stones on the crest;
they rested their arms on the wall, looking east searchingly for the
bit of blue coast and the sails.

"There, there, I can see it," she cried. He looked at her
incredulously. There was nothing but a nebulous mass of blue. "Well, I
have seen it," she protested, "two or three times. To-day it is a bit
hazy."

"Why do you want to see it?" he asked, idly.

"Oh, it is so different! It is big and strange and unfamiliar; don't
you like it?"

"'There is a world beyond!'" He answered without direct appositeness.
They turned to the shade of the nut-trees. In the July sun the woods
seemed asleep, merely soothed by a wandering breeze, and they flung
themselves down on the warm ground. All about the air swam with
pleasant, heated, drowsy, earthy odors.

As she took off her hat and nestled back into the undergrowth,
Thornton felt her anaemic body, pale from the fatigue of the hot walk,
as if the water-lily were drooping in the mid-day sun. Yet she was
somehow intimately connected with the brooding earth. There were two
bodies--the body of flesh that had come with fatigue and feebleness
into the world, and the body of passion that was blooming into power.

She talked of the thousand trivialities that go to make the
conversation between a man and a woman. Thornton lay silently,
stretched on the warm leaves at her feet, feeling her bloodless face
with its sharp blue veining. Each was conscious of a dynamic something
in the air; their minds had a frank understanding while the talk
skipped in and out among nothings. When she began once more to talk of
the sea that lay down there beyond the green meadows and the blue
haze, a faint rose-color of animation darted over the pallor and made
the moist eyes flash. The sea! That stood in her mind for the
mysteries of change, of the unknown. Thornton knew that this
wistfulness after change had nothing definite in it