birch tree. How I loved her! How happy we were! But he who accepts human
love must bind it to his soul with pain, and she is not lost to me.
Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it."

Uncle Blair looked up at the evening star. We saw that he had forgotten
us, and we slipped away, hand in hand, leaving him alone in the
memory-haunted shadows of the old orchard.

CHAPTER XXVIII. THE PATH TO ARCADY

October that year gathered up all the spilled sunshine of the summer and
clad herself in it as in a garment. The Story Girl had asked us to
try to make the last month together beautiful, and Nature seconded our
efforts, giving us that most beautiful of beautiful things--a gracious
and perfect moon of falling leaves. There was not in all that vanished
October one day that did not come in with auroral splendour and go out
attended by a fair galaxy of evening stars--not a day when there were
not golden lights in the wide pastures and purple hazes in the ripened
distances. Never was anything so gorgeous as the maple trees that year.
Maples are trees that have primeval fire in their souls. It glows out a
little in their early youth, before the leaves open, in the redness and
rosy-yellowness of their blossoms, but in summer it is carefully hidden
under a demure, silver-lined greenness. Then when autumn comes, the
maples give up trying to be sober and flame out in all the barbaric
splendour and gorgeousness of their real nature, making of the hills
things out of an Arabian Nights dream in the golden prime of good Haroun
Alraschid.

You may never know what scarlet and crimson really are until you see
them in their perfection on an October hillside, under the unfathomable
blue of an autumn sky. All the glow and radiance and joy at earth's
heart seem to have broken loose in a splendid determination to express
itself for once before the frost of winter chills her beating pulses. It
is the year's carnival ere the dull Lenten days of leafless valleys and
penitential mists come.

The time of apple-picking had come around once more and we worked
joyously. Uncle Blair picked apples with us, and between him and the
Story Girl it was an October never to be forgotten.

"Will you go far afield for a walk with me to-day?" he said to her and
me, one idle afternoon of opal skies, pied meadows and misty hills.

It was Saturday and Peter had gone home; Felix and Dan were helping
Uncle Alec top turnips; Cecily and Feli