youth sadness has a touch of beauty, a glamour of
romance which shrouds its deepest pain. It is as if something within us,
infinitely wise, were smiling, knowing well that for the young there is
always to-morrow.

The maple by the schoolhouse turned early that year. When Esther, in her
pilgrimage, came to say good-bye it welcomed her with all the glory of
autumn. Against its greener brothers it stood out, naming, defiant.
Beside it, the red pump seemed no longer red. Red and yellow, its
falling leaves tossed themselves into the girl's lap as she sat upon the
porch steps. It is almost certain that, as Esther gathered them, she
compared her sad heart to a leaf which had fluttered from the tree of
happy life. There seemed no outlook for her. She could not see through
winter into spring.

The school children with their new teacher (whom Esther could not help
but feel was sadly incompetent) had all gone home and it was very quiet
on the porch steps. She closed her eyes and dreamed and clearly through
her dream she heard, as she had heard that first morning in early
summer, a determinedly cheerful, yet husky, voice singing. Some one was
coming down the hill.

"From Wimbleton to Wombleton is fifteen miles;
From Wombleton to Wimbleton is fifteen miles;
From Wimbleton to Wombleton, from Wombleton to Wimbleton,
From Wimbleton to Wombleton,--"

The song trailed off into silence as it had done before. The girl's
closed eyes smarted with tears--"Oh, it is a very long way!" she
murmured, and burying her face in fallen leaves she felt that at last
she knew the meaning of despair.

But though his voice had echoed through Esther's dream, Callandar was
not on the long hill nor anywhere near it. Unlike Esther, he paid no
farewells during these last days. He avoided the hill particularly and
drove past the schoolhouse seldom and always at top speed. If the sight
of the turning maples moved him at all it was not because he compared
his lost happiness to a fallen leaf. Callandar was long past such gentle
sadnesses as these. Every day he filled as full of work as possible. He
walked far and hard in hope of tiring himself into dreamless sleep at
night. And every day his face grew older, greyer, more sternly set.

At the very last, and as if inspired by some special imp of the
perverse, Mary declared that she must have a church wedding. Opposition
was useless. With all the distorted force of her drug-ridden brain,