had alternated between being borne along a
stream of love or fascination, or left in an eddy, and in the eddies
he had not desired to think, rather to be picked up on a wave's top and
swept along again.

"The despairing, dying autumn and our love--how well they harmonize!"
said Eleanor sadly one day as they lay dripping by the water.

"The Indian summer of our hearts--" he ceased.

"Tell me," she said finally, "was she light or dark?"

"Light."

"Was she more beautiful than I am?"

"I don't know," said Amory shortly.

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of
glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor,
dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty in curious elfin love
moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness
of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be
nearly musical.

"Light a match," she whispered. "I want to see you."

Scratch! Flare!

The night and the scarred trees were like scenery in a play, and to be
there with Eleanor, shadowy and unreal, seemed somehow oddly familiar.
Amory thought how it was only the past that ever seemed strange and
unbelievable. The match went out.

"It's black as pitch."

"We're just voices now," murmured Eleanor, "little lonesome voices.
Light another."

"That was my last match."

Suddenly he caught her in his arms.

"You _are_ mine--you know you're mine!" he cried wildly... the moonlight
twisted in through the vines and listened... the fireflies hung upon
their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.

*****

THE END OF SUMMER

"No wind is stirring in the grass; not one wind stirs... the water
in the hidden pools, as glass, fronts the full moon and so inters
the golden token in its icy mass," chanted Eleanor to the trees that
skeletoned the body of the night. "Isn't it ghostly here? If you can
hold your horse's feet up, let's cut through the woods and find the
hidden pools."

"It's after one, and you'll get the devil," he objected, "and I don't
know enough about horses to put one away in the pitch dark."

"Shut up, you old fool," she whispered irrelevantly, and, leaning over,
she patted him lazily with her riding-crop. "You can leave your old plug
in our stable and I'll send him over to-morrow."

"But my uncle has got to drive me to the station with this old plug at
seven o'clock."

"Don't be a spoil-sport--re