ed, its extreme of sweetness pressed out
beneath the torrid sunbeams as under flaming hoofs. Lucina passed
between the wilting ranks and flattened beds of flowers, and the
breath of them in her face was like the rankest sweetness of love,
when its delicacy, even for itself, is all gone. The pungent odor of
box was like a shameless call from the street. Lucina went into the
summer-house and sat down. It was stifling, and the desperate
sweetnesses of the garden seemed to have collected there, as in a
nest.

Lucina, after a minute, sprang up, her face was a deep pink, she had
a gentle distracted frown on her sweet forehead, her lips were
pouting; she did not look in the least like the Lucina of the early
spring.

She went out of the summer-house, and down the garden paths, and then
over a stone wall, into the rear field, which bounded it. This field
had been mowed not long before, and the stubble was pink and gold in
the afternoon light.

The field was broad, and skirted on the west by a thick wood. Lucina,
holding her green parasol, crossed the field to the wood. The stubble
was hot to her feet, white butterflies flew in her face, rusty-winged
things hurled themselves in her path, like shrill completions from
some mill of insect life.

All along the wood there was a border of shadow. Lucina kept close to
the trees, and so down the field. A faint, cool dampness stole out
from the depths of the wood and tempered the heat for the width of
its shade. Lucina put down her parasol; she was walking quite
steadily, as if with a purpose.

The wood extended the length of many fields, running parallel with
the main village street, behind the houses. Lucina, passing the
Prescott house from the rear, instead of the front, seeing the
unpainted walls and roof-slopes of barn and wood-sheds, and the
garden, had a curious sense of retroversion in material things which
suited well her mind. She felt that day as if she were turned
backward to her own self.

The fields were divided from one another by stone walls. Lucina
crossed these, and kept on until she reached a field some distance
beyond Doctor Prescott's house. Then she left the shadow of the wood,
and crossed the field to the main road. In crossing this she kept
close to the wall, slinking along rapidly, for she felt guilty; this
field was all waving with brown heads of millet which should not have
been trampled.

She got to the road and nobody had seen her. She crossed it,