osing the bareness it had beautified so briefly.
Even the most casual observer could now see that autumn had made a long
forward march in the last three days toward the confines of winter.

That afternoon Leigh called upon Miss Wycliffe, not without a thought
that the interval which had elapsed since the dinner was decidedly
short. Still, he would come ostensibly to report the result of the
interview she had suggested, and, as the election was not far distant,
he felt that this excuse, if one were needed, was entirely adequate.
To his chagrin, he found that she was not at home. The maid informed
him further that she had gone to New York for a week. As he walked
slowly away, he wondered almost resentfully at this sudden
disappearance, as if he felt that she ought to stay in Warwick and
watch the result of her experiment. But he did not consider that if
the daughters of men would be clothed like the lilies of the field,
they must seek periodically the place most remote from the solitude in
which their models grow.

The week that followed was one in which autumn flung out all her brave
banners in a final pageantry. The nights were cold and still, with
stars peculiarly brilliant. Each morning the mists hung like fleecy
cobwebs in the valley, filaments that parted and drifted away at the
touch of the sun, disclosing the magic work of the nocturnal frosts
upon the foliage of the trees. It seemed to Leigh, looking from his
eyrie, that Nature had never before painted a panorama of such wondrous
beauty. Here a solitary elm in the meadow below the cliff, in the
region which the collegians called "over the rock," stood forth all
crimson against the green sward; further on, the woods began, masses of
yellow and red maples, with scattered pines and oaks of more sombre
hue, billowing gently upward toward the blue of the distant skyline.

It was now that the young astronomer began to take up once more the
pursuit that had been so long interrupted. He felt that if he were to
accomplish something, he must begin a series of observations with a
definite end in view. There was also another motive than the desire of
professional reputation--a wish to increase his worth in Miss
Wycliffe's eyes by achievement. Her absence from town, though of only
a few days' duration, freed him from the distraction which the very
possibility of seeing her presented, and night after night he ascended
to his watch-tower.

But he presently discov