n four. I shall just
do for them all the time, whether or no."

"And what if they are bad and troublesome, Glory?"

"Oh, they won't be," she replied. "I shall love them so!"

CHAPTER XXXV.

INDIAN SUMMER.

"'Tis as if the benignant Heaven
Had a new revelation given,
And written it out with gems;
For the golden tops of the elms
And the burnished bronze of the ash
And the scarlet lights that flash
From the sumach's points of flame,
Like blazonings on a scroll
Spell forth an illumined Name
For the reading of the soul!"

It is of no use to dispute about the Indian summer. I never found two
people who could agree as to the time when it ought to be here, or upon
a month and day when it should be decidedly too late to look for it. It
keeps coming. After the equinoctial, which begins to be talked about
with the first rains of September, and isn't done with till the sun has
measured half a dozen degrees of south declination, all the pleasant
weather is Indian summer--away on to Christmastide. For my part, I think
we get it now and then, little by little, as "the kingdom" comes. That
every soft, warm, mellow, hazy, golden day, like each fair, fragrant
life, is a part and outcrop of it; though weeks of gale and frost, or
ages of cruel worldliness and miserable sin may lie between.

It was an Indian summer day, then; and it was in October.

Faith and Mr. Armstrong walked over the brook, and round by Pasture
Rocks, to the "little chapel," as Faith had called it, since the time,
last winter, when she and Glory had met the minister there, in the
still, wonderful, pure beauty that enshrined it on that "diamond
morning."

The elms that stood then, in their icy sheen, about the meadows, like
great cataracts of light, were soft with amber drapery, now; translucent
in each leaf with the detained sunshine of the summer; and along the
borders of the wood walk, scarlet flames of sumach sprang out, vivid,
from among the lingering green; and birches trembled with their golden
plumes; and bronzed ash boughs, and deep crimsons and maroons and
chocolate browns and carbuncle red that crowned the oaks with richer and
intenser hues, made up a wealth and massiveness of beauty wherein eye
and thought reveled and were sated.

Over and about all, the glorious October light, and the dreamy warmth
that was like a palpable love.

They stood on the crisp moss carpet of the "halfway rock"--the altar
crag behind them, with it